My Fishing Misadventures - a true story, a photo essay, an embarrassing journey

So I promised a few friends on the Isle of Write discord that one of these days, I’ll tell them about my fishing trip this past Sunday. A promise is a promise, so here goes.

My Fishing Misadventures

We have a friend who has a boat - a twenty or so foot long Alumina - essentially, a military-green thingiemaggiger with low sides and not much keel. I live fifteen minutes away from an estuary, with those glorious sand and mangrove-covered shores and reed islands and oyster beds. So we make a plan to go fishing on this particular Sunday. The friend, let’s call him Bob, though he is not, checks the tides and the weather. See - he’s more local to Florida than we are (hubby and I are more New York City than Florida still), and Bob-not-Bob was born in the sunshine state. He also spent a whole year living on a sailboat moored in some bay in South Florida. And so he tells us it’ll be around low 50s (cold, but won’t kill us), and the tides will be in our favor (whatever that means) starting at around noon.

The night before, hubby loses a hard drive to the gods of technology and stays up resurrecting data till the sun comes up, so naturally, he’s not going fishing. That leaves me, Bob and the offspring. Offspring is a 6’-tall, skinny stick of 17 year-old angst and snark, battling each other for prevalence. But offspring had wanted to go fishing or crabbing or whatever it was we were going to do on the water, had in fact been begging for it. Up until that Sunday morning, when he took the dog out for his morning piss (the dog’s, not the offspring’s) and came back shivering. “That shit outside - that’s like…. It’s like winter,” he’d stated. I made extra strong coffee. Teenager sneezed. A few times. Looked at me, trying to bail with those ridiculously over-sized brown pools of sweetness. I gave him a cup of steaming coffee with too much sugar in it, and told him to get his ass dressed. The way he would if he were going to Alaska.

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I must pause here for a moment. See, I grew up in the Arctic, the very literal Arctic, somewhat North of what people consider the coldest part of Russia, i.e. Siberia (wrongly, by the way, as Siberia is a very large place that stretches through a few climate zones). In any event, I lived smack dab in the middle of the Arctic Circle for most of my growing up. So I know cold. Intimately. Hubby is a New Yorker. It gets bloody cold there too–the wet chill from the rivers making liars out of temperature gauges. Offspring spent fifteen out of his seventeen years in Florida. He does not know cold. He’d never been to Alaska. And sadder still, all of us, collectively, are ill-prepared for an unplanned adventure anywhere above the Mason Dixon line. Not politically or sensibilities wise. Weather-preparedness-wise.

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I make Offspring put on long johns. Thank god we have a pair of those. And two sweaters. And a light down jacket that states on a label that it’ll keep him warm to just below freezing. I do the same thing. Thermals, socks with some wool in them, a pair of sweaters, a skinny down jacket, a ridiculous hat–my only hat. I text Bob who’d not yet left his house and ask him to bring his warm stuff, whatever size or purpose. And he does. Because Bob is awesome like that.

By the time we leave our house–coolers with ice, and rods, and those DIY pool noodle crabbing things I’d made the last time we went out on the water, all packed up in the truck–we are bundled up like we are, indeed, traveling to the arctic. Windbreaker jackets on top of what we already had on, extra hats, gloves–the works. Because Bob.

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Bings Landing is a small but spectacular park with a public boat launch. A short drive, and we’re there, only the parking lot is deserted. This place is usually packed on weekends, but there are a total of five cars here, including ours. As we’re untangling the boat from the truck at the ramp, a fisherman is pulling his up on the trailer. He looks right for a fisherman. Like the type who knows what he’s doing. He tells us that the tide is too damn low to go into the estuary, and that we’ll likely get stuck. Bob’s boat doesn’t need much water, not if we don’t drop the outboard all the way in. We figure we won’t go as far out as we planned, but we’ll be ok. The channel out to the estuary is deep, so we’ll take that and find the first turn into a creek with a reed island in it and catch us some red fish.

If you’ve never had it, red fish is some of the best tasting fish there is. A rarity in stores here, too, and never as good as fresh-caught.

I sit on one of the coolers at the bow of the boat as Bob starts the motor, Offspring in the middle, for balance, and we’re off. The water is a mess of dark grays and browns, and choppy. The spray hits me in the face but I’m happy to be out of the house, in nature. The first five or so times anyway. It’s decidedly chilly, so happy is becoming harder to hold on to with each spray of water on my face.

Offspring turns his back to the waves, stares longingly toward the dock. Then, the wind hits, and we suddenly realize where we went wrong with our weather predictions. 20 MPH from the North. Probably all the way from that Arctic place I grew up in. We huddle into ourselves until we see a tiny turn and veer into it, gently as we can, given that the water is as impenetrable as the Black Sea. The wind dies for a brief moment and it’s almost pretty, or at least oddly peaceful…. For a moment.

You see, on a good day, and likely on most average or even some perfectly shitty days, this particular place is glorious. This is where shore birds do their hunting; where Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphin come out to play–the water here is brackish, basically salt water. There are reeds in the middle of these vast, vast watery spaces that come alive when the light hits them just right, looking like so much over-ripe wheat, only under-hued, sepia-toned. In this estuary, you are guaranteed to see at least one magnificent Great Blue Heron spread its gigantic wings and take flight, its long legs sticking out, colt-like, adorably awkward. If you are lucky enough to get close, you’ll see that they are, indeed, blue. A slightly desaturated indigo.

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This photo generously donated for use by my uber talented hubby, who might come back to Steemit one day @j-o-n

This photo generously donated for use by my uber talented hubby, who might come back to Steemit one day @j-o-n

This photo generously donated for use by my uber talented hubby, who might come back to Steemit one day @j-o-n

Today, the estuary is ugly. I’d never seen it ugly before, but there it is. Bob-the-Boater wants to navigate us closer to shore, and anchor in-between that and an oyster bed to our right. I stare at the oyster bed, a mountain of jagged shells, sticking well out of the water and it hits me then for the first time just how screwed we probably are. These same oyster beds have scraped the bottoms of our kayaks plenty of times before for me not to recall that I’d never actually seen them as such, just their shadows, a darkening of the water where the light stumbles and retracts. They’re always, even at low tide, just a bit underwater, under one’s boat, not jutting good four feet into the air.

Bob is an optimist. The tide and the wind are fighting the boat, pushing it straight into the island of reeds, and Bob-the-Optimist, proceeds to use an anchor to propel us to where we want to go. He’s at it for a while with minimal success, but the oyster bed looms just a tad larger now. The water is still dropping. The dead low of the tide is not due for another three hours. The wind and the spray of water that would have been welcomed respite from the scorching sun on most days is becoming very hard to ignore. In short, we’re all already freezing, and have been for some time. The anchor trick isn’t working, and we can’t drop the motor in even a few inches without killing it. That’s when the first scrapey sound breaks the silence. And another. And we all know we’re stuck. Boat meet bottom of the estuary kind of stuck.

Offspring dons another pair of gloves, stares at me accusingly, mutters something about not really being all that into fishing in the first place. He’s hugging himself warm. Bob and I look at the cooler. The wind and the tide will likely keep us from being able to cast our lines if we wanted to actually attempt fishing; we both know that much. The smaller cooler has Stellas and Coronas. Bob and I open the Coronas and toast silently, our mouths feeling too wax-like to form words. Then, we break down laughing. None of it is funny, of course, but we’re both stupidly relieved we can still laugh. Offspring does not laugh. We offer him a beer. Yeah, yeah, I know–underaged, but trust me, he needed it. Offspring does not accept the offering. That’s when I know how truly miserable he is and begin wishing for a rescue helicopter.

Bob-the-Prepper puts together a push stick–a ridiculously long contraption made of some carbon composite and generally used to push gently away from shore. Bob puts all of his 150 pounds behind that sucker and tries to push us out of this particular bit of stuck, stick sinking into the silt or sand or dead oyster fragments down below. Slowly, painfully slowly, we move just a tad closer to that shoreline we’d been gunning for. And get utterly, irrevocably stuck not five feet away from the foam covered bank. The white wave spit looks remarkably like snow, and in this cold, I’m having a hard time convincing myself that it’s just churned up foam.

Bob-the-Rescuer takes off his boots and puts on slip on snickers, grabs the boat by the rope tied to the bow and jumps into the water. His final and, he thinks, best idea is to walk the boat out into water just deep enough to anchor, fish some, and get the hell out. And so he pulls on the rope, trying to make the boat move, as if it were a reluctant cow whisked away from pasture too early. The boat gives a few inches. Offspring and I are holding our breath in anticipation. Nobody moves or says a word. And so we watch as Bob-the-Unfortunate puts his foot down and sinks with it, almost to his knee. He pulls it back up, the sucking-squishy sound accompanying that step, moves the other foot with the same result. This bank, it appears, is made of mud.

Bob loses his shoes over and over again, digs them out, puts them back on, each step and a pull on the rope just a tiny tug the boat feels but refuses to obey. I’m trying to help by pushing off the bottom with the push stick, Offspring is doing the same with a wooden paddle that looks too pretty to be used for this, but it’s all we have. None of it gets us any closer to where we want to go. Or at least out of where we are. We are still more or less at the open mouth of the channel, protected by nothing from the wind or the cold.

Bob-the-Idea-Man tells us somberly that if we both got off the boat and helped pull the sucker, this would work. He eyes the lifejackets none of us could wear on top of all we had on, and we use them as a bridge through the mud to get us to shore. Bob stays close to the boat, already soaked as he is, so he can guide it. Offspring and I trudge through the muddy shore, using new mangrove growth to keep us from sinking into the sticky mess. Mangrove roots, or whatever those tendril-like things are, make for difficult walking, and for a brief moment, I picture those who were here long before Henry Flagler had the bright idea to build a railroad to the Keys, so his wife, suffering from consumption, would get better. (She didn’t, by the way.) I picture the natives, whoever they were in these parts, trudging through this alien landscape in sandals, and then realize that they very likely never did that. That they knew their tides and weather patterns well enough not to ever have to.

The going is slow, but for once, the damn boat is moving. We’re all moving, some. I am feeling slightly warmer from all the fighting with plants. I’m almost smiling. Until we come upon a full grown mangrove tree that’s blocking our path. Offspring is ahead of me. I quickly calculate that we’d have to slide under the lowest branches of this mangrove, sticking close to the trunk, to avoid getting stuck in mud. Not quickly enough, it turns out. Offspring takes a large step toward the water to bypass the tree, sinks awkwardly, lopsidedly in. For the next few minutes I watch my child, as I’m holding the branches up, so they don’t clank him on the head, struggle in that trapped-animal way. He is trying to get his leg out of the mud by pulling on it over and over again, to no avail. He is pissed and cold and terrified. Bob-the-Native tells Offspring to try to lean in opposing direction of stuck, but Offspring is at the end of helpless at this stage. Finally, Bob throws the too-pretty wooden paddle to him and Offspring extricates himself and some five pounds of channel mud back onto more or less solid ground.

We make it far enough around the curve to where we’re no longer in danger of being stuck so completely and board the boat, but the water is still far too low to engage the motor, and there is no way we can get anywhere without the outboard with the winds and the currents. We anchor and prepare to wait it out. Offspring, muddy, wet, exhausted walks to the middle of the boat, gets on the metal floor and curls in on himself, infant-like. We throw all the extra warm stuff we can find on top of the lump that is my child, and let him be.

For the next hour or so Bob-the-Fisherman and I sit there with our lines in the water. The lines–what we can see of them–are dragged and flung like so much dandelion fluff. We catch nothing. To my right, there is an oyster bed, one we’re anchored to, so it’s close. The temperature has dropped another few degrees since we first got here. We are both shivering, and wishing for hot coffee or tea instead of the ice cold beers neither of us can bear to even think about. I light a cigarette, a task that takes a good few minutes because of the wind, a task I finally accomplish by sticking my head inside the canvas bag now empty of jackets. Bob lights his off of the gloriously red, burning tip of mine.

I ask Bob-the-Floridian when the last time he’d eaten oysters was, and he tells me he never had. I grab a small scoop net and a long two-pronged grilling utensil I’d temporarily swiped from my kitchen just in case we came upon some oysters, and the remainder of our trip is spent knee deep in water collecting clusters of muddy oysters. The water feels surprisingly warm though we both know it isn’t. It’s just not near as freezing as the air. We collect half a cooler of the things before we can’t feel our hands, at which point we decide we’d all had enough, and tide or not, we must head back.

Bob has to walk the boat to deep enough water against the wind and the current, the motor simply not cooperating at the depth we’re in. By the time we get back to the dock, the light is dusky, more blue than gray, but the wind has died. We put the heat on full blast in the truck on the way back. Offspring takes a hot shower with everything he wore still on him. My dear sweet hubby, whom I called from the dock with the shortest of fishing reports–“caught dick. Frozen solid. Offspring hates me”–went to the store and bought dinner and a ton of hot chocolate.

At my house, Bob-the-Adventurous has his very first oysters, raw, the only true way to eat the suckers. They are gloriously fresh, better than any I’d ever bought. Bob is now an oyster aficionado. Offspring dares try one as well - also a first. Doesn’t care for it. “Slimy, slippery nothings,” he says.

It is mutually agreed upon that the next fishing adventure will have to wait until the mercury hits 65. And hubby is coming with. Because it’s only fair that should we find ourselves stuck - he’s right where he’s supposed to be. Surrounded by his muddy, dirty, exasperated loved ones.

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All the shitty images are mine. The glorious ones in the middle of the shore bird, the dolphins and the great blue heron are courtesy of @j-o-n but taken, naturally, on a different day, though to the same place.
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