August daydreams and reflections

Posted 11/16/12

ther than during the winter months, August may be the toughest one for anglers, especially trout anglers. To start with, it’s hard to find water with a temperature in the 60s. So we’re relegated …

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August daydreams and reflections

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ther than during the winter months, August may be the toughest one for anglers, especially trout anglers. To start with, it’s hard to find water with a temperature in the 60s. So we’re relegated to small-mouth bass in river riffles or large-mouth in lakes and ponds, but it can be slow—you know, “dog days of summer.”

When I think of August, I immediately think of my father, who was born in August 1910. My mind does a slow August drift when I’m not actively chasing fish. For instance, I think about how 1910 was such a seminal year. It was the year of Haley’s Comet. The skies were alive with meteors that year. Seventy-six years earlier, Mark Twain (b.1835) was born under the previous Haley’s Comet sky, and he departed this earthly realm at the comet’s next coming in 1910, as did Winslow Homer, Tolstoy and Florence Nightingale (b.1820) who died eight days after my father was born.

I suppose in a way my own story really begins with my father’s birth, and the fact that he was linked chronologically with both Homer and Twain intrigues me. I grew up reading Twain (his entire works sit on a shelf in our home, often with one or two of the volumes on someone’s nightstand) and enjoy rereading many of his works. I’ll go out of my way to see any showing of Homer. His art has to be personally seen to be fully appreciated.

Florence Nightingale first attained fame as the “Lady with the Lamp” in the Crimean War (the one in 1854, not the current one). It intrigues me to think that her life actually overlapped with my Dad’s because she seems so iconic and distant. My father was born before airplane or automobile travel, telephone or TV, not to mention computers and electronic wizardry.

Considering his long and eventful life, it’s a wonder to me that of all the things we ever did together or talked about, it is the fishing I remember the best. Imagine sharing all those years, and yet it was the simple act of catching fish that brought us together the most and resulted in my fondest memories.

I had a blessed childhood. Growing up in America in the ‘50s and ‘60s was simply wonderful. Life was good and I have more than my share of great memories. Some of them are understandably muted with time. But I can tell you with alarming clarity what fish we caught and how we caught them. In the early 1950s, we fished out of his little catboat, clammed from it and crabbed from it. Later, with the Lyman lapstrake 35 hp Johnson, we fished from Jones Inlet to Captree—bass, bluefish, flounder, fluke and more. By 1960, we fished out of the 22-foot Chris Craft Sea Skiff “Dandy.” Trolling for stripers off Long Beach was the best. We always came home with a boatload.

There were eight in our family and those fish hauls were served up fresh at the dinner table. No catch and release then. My mother, who grew up in Boston, could cook anything that swam. My favorite meal was blue claw crabs in a marinara sauce over pasta. We ate the crabs on a newspaper-covered picnic table out on the beach overlooking the Great South Bay, a Sunday feast.

In the long span of our lives, I have many memories of my dad, but the fondest ones were the ones when we left the dock early and came home late in the day, sunburned and with sea-legs and a bunch of iced fish. The more we caught, the longer it took to clean and fillet them. After a while you get pretty handy at that task. We often chatted happily while we cleaned those fish sitting on old wooden milk crates.

So I think I can give you some friendly advice about fishing in August or perhaps any other time of year; take your child or grandchild fishing. You just may create some memories that will last a lifetime. Mine have.

(E-mail me at andyboyar@gmail.com for comments and upcoming events.)

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