Day 5 at the Beach

So whatever happened to days 2-4? The beach happened. I got caught up in doing beach stuff. I did take pictures and videos and will eventually upload all of them.

“Bitch” Chronicles

Day 5

For me, I couldn’t have asked for a better day. We awoke to a rocking wind that had stirred up the ocean world. The sea was boiling. Swells were chummy, absolutely crashing and banging into each other in their effort to discharge their energy upon the shore.

I started the day at about 7am with a walk south from our Salvo base to the point where the Federal government demands my attention: NONE SHALL PASS, the sign says. Can’t you read the sign? Birds are nesting, terns and plovers. They demand solitude. I guess they are shy. In a lonely act of defiance, I slid my right foot under the red warning rope and left a clear human print in the virgin sand just on the other side. Then, carefully, I placed the print of my left foot beside it.

On my way back, I encountered a lone fisherman on the beach. You could tell from the way he nervously tended his line and by his fresh looking gear, that he was a novice- not a sea dog. I asked him the obligatory question, “Caught anything?”

He just laughed a shook his head saying, “No, I’m just down here to get away from the kids for an hour.”

After a simple breakfast back at the house, I hauled my beach cart loaded with essential fishing gear back to the beach. While the wind was blowing straight into my face from the east at about 15-25 mph, I felt exceedingly refreshed. I plopped my poles in their sand stakes, cut some squid for bait and threw out two lines. I then proceeded to ignore them as I worked on reading the book, Brooklyn by Colm Toibin.

For the next six hours, that’s all I did. Read and recast my lines. My time was punctuated by several breaks throughout the morning. Sometimes, I’d notice my line had gone slack and wash up the beach. Ordinarily in surf this rough, I’d expect my line to wash in with the rising tide, but since I was using a revolutionary “sputnik” lead weight (aka satellite), I was confident that the only reason for my line to wash was a visit from a negative species. A negative species is a creature that is so vile and annoyingly ordinary that it gets you negative points on the species point collection list. For example, if I were to catch a croaker, that would be one species point. The same is true for a bluefish, a Spanish mackerel, a drum, a flounder or a blow toad. If, however, I were to haul in a dogfish (aka dog shark), that would be worth negative one in species points. “That-Which-Shall-Not –Be-Named” (aka…I can’t say) is worth negative two species points. Sure enough, every time I had a slack line, I had one or two dogfish on the line.

Dogfish, although exceedingly annoying, do create quite a stir on a tourist beach when they are reeled in. People passing by stop and gawk and ask questions like, “Is that thing gonna grow up to be a Great White?” or “You gonna k-e-e-l it?” I always just toss them back; however, the little annoying devils are a pain in the neck to unhook sometimes. Although only about a foot and a half long, these sharks have sharp razor teeth like their bigger cousins. They have the prominent shark jaw just like the big boys as well. Frequently, the snelled hook get them under their tongue (sharks apparently have tongues) and behind their razor jaw. Thus, unhooking them is sometimes quite challenging.

One of the things I’m amazed at is the number of vacationers that come up to me for fishing advice. Every time that happens, I just laugh to myself. If only they could have seen me fifteen years ago when I went on my first expedition with my father and brothers. I didn’t even know how to tie a fisherman’s knot. I couldn’t explain to you how to cast a surf rod. I knew nothing! Now, thanks to the wonderful professional beach cart that I use, along with my experienced family surf casting rigs, backwards hat, stubble beard, and my overreaching tanned belly, people think that I’m the hardest bastard on the bitch. They’re always stopping to ask questions like, “When do you have your best luck?” “What kind of bait are you using?” “What do people catch out here?” “Where do you go crabbing?” For each question, I patiently make up an answer that sounds like I know what I’m talking about.

After the beach, I went home took a dip in the house pool, and read my book all afternoon, except for the moment of high drama.

My nephew has been talking about getting a sea kayak for a couple of days. I’ve been suggesting that the weather was too extreme for it. However, during the afternoon the winds began to back off a bit, although the surf was still roiling. Jake and Reena spend the morning out in the sound on a catamaran and enjoyed themselves immensely. Jake has done quite a bit of sailing from his days in prep school and then at Swarthmore. He definitely knows his way around a boat. So when he brought the kayak back, I helped him drag it over the dunes to the beach ,and he and Reena plotted strategy on how to breech the 7-10 breaking waves along the shore.

Reena started off in the boat while Jake pushed it out. That strategy quickly failed as the swells knocked Reena out of the vessel. So she grabbed the paddles and made her way through the surf just past the breakers. Jake, meanwhile, continued drinking the ocean as he pushed the boat out. Eventually, he made headway and then they managed to slip onboard. We could see them madly paddling and turning in to the massive swells. Each swell would pick up the dwarfed kayak and lift it vertically. Jake and Reena could be seen clinging on for dear life as the rode the beasts. Very soon, seemingly as quick as the Wright Brothers first flight, they turned around and did their best Hawaii Five-O landing.

Then came dinner and the sunset. Then came lounging on the bed pretending to read, but really falling asleep. Then came going to bed.