Fishing!

We all got up at 4:15 this morning to make a 6 am boat launch on Kent Island.  None of us had any idea what we really signed up for.  We just were hoping to get at least one good fish to eat for dinner.

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Instead of getting just one, we caught twelve big rockfish – there is a 2 fish limit per person (Edda didn’t come along on this trip).  My mom loves to fish, but she mainly fishes off of piers and shores, so she’s getting only small little fish.  She’s never been out on the Chesapeake Bay on a boat (which is pretty incredible given her love of fishing and that she’s lived by the bay for over 40 years) – with a guide to help find the fish and help teach us how to use the equipment.  It was pretty incredible.  I wanted to talk to the captain about how the fish population has changed over his lifetime (he’s been on the waters his whole life), but he focused on how there is so much more technology – cell phones, sonar, etc. which I’m sure is important, but maybe I was searching for something more poetic and he wasn’t a poetic kind of guy.

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I am always fond of this quote by John Smith about the Bay:

“A few Bevers, Otters, Beares, Martins and minkes we found, and in divers places that aboundance of fish, lying so thicke with their heads above the water, as for want of nets (our barge driving amongst them) we attempted to catch them with a frying pan: but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for smal fish, had any of us ever seene in any place so swimming in the water, but they are not to be caught with frying pans.”
Captain John Smith, 1608

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I just like imagining the Bay so thick with fish that you could imagine catching them with frying pans.  I know the Bay was really not well when I was a child, and the captain did mention that there was a 5 year moratorium on catching the exact fish that we caught today – so it made me happy to see that fishing was good for us today.  And I really have never seen my mother happier – I’m happy that I was able to arrange for us to be together to do this.

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