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Topic: Your today in pictures..
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted February 20, 2017 06:40 PM
Captree Boat Basin
We have a great tradition in my family. Every winter since was a little kid, when the weather first becomes a little less than Arctic, we go down to the boat basin at Captree State Park.
This is where our local fishing fleet docks. These aren’t commercial trawlers headed out into the Atlantic after tuna, but party boats taking paying customers out into the shallows after fluke and flounder.
Now, let’s ponder sport fishing: consider for example going out for Marlin. There you sit strapped into a chair bolted to the deck. The rod is held in a harness strapped around your waist because the action would be too heavy for you to hold it in your hands. There you take your stand: locked in mortal combat with this spectacular beast. Hundreds of pounds of muscle threatening to break your line, you can’t ever reel it in all at once: the reel screams as you let the line run out, and someone has to pour water over it or it will overheat.
If after hours and hours of this your own endurance holds out, you are rewarded with a spectacular trophy and great stories of a day you will remember the rest of your life.
Flounder Fishing IS…not in the least like this!
Very typically you spend the day standing at the rail with maybe fifty others on the same boat. You use this stubby little rod which for some reason Dad never explained you hold with the reel on top. You put two hooks on a spreader with sinkers and chopped up worms of some unknown species on the hooks.
There you stand by the hour: bouncing this odd assembly off the bottom, maybe eight feet under the keel.
If you are really lucky, you may catch this:
-now I’m asking you: if you saw something like this wash up on your beach, wouldn’t you suspect some kind of toxic spill in the area? –but no: that’s what they’re SUPPOSED to look like!
Don’t get me wrong: heading out for Flounder is a great local tradition and generations of us have done it. My grandfather in particular did it all the time. To me it’s just one of those things made much better by beer!
Our tradition is a little different. My Dad was always of the opinion that there was nothing that ailed you a little salt air and clam chowder couldn’t cure. So every year just around now, when the snow is just starting to melt we head down to Captree, walk along the docks and then stop in at the café for lunch.
-it turns out even if all you are doing is getting a little fresh air and a change of scenery, Dad was right!
-------------------- All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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Steve Klare
Film Guy
Posts: 7016
From: Long Island, NY, USA
Registered: Jun 2003
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posted February 23, 2017 10:20 PM
That's sad about Russ Glendinning, Graham. Sometimes it takes a champion to make the difference between a lost cause and a surprise success, and right now it seems the Flyer needs a champion.
Somewhere on the 'net there is an interview with him (I found it just once and never again!) about his experiences running the train while they were filming "A Train for Christmas."
Ever the trainman, he said "We would have been on time that day if it wasn't for the #$%@in' film crew!".
-and the beer battered fish is nice, too!
I remember those days of going out for flounder with Dad and my uncle from down on the South Shore. It was barely 6AM and the sun hung low over Ocean Parkway all the way out to Captree. We'd spend our day with those poles..."up, down, up, down..." Every so often somebody would pull up a crab or a sea robin. Sometimes it would actually be a flounder...looking it's usual deformed self. Later on we got back to the house and Dad would fillet them for dinner. Being about twelve I thought cleaning the fish was disgusting, but the knife was kind of cool!
One time somebody succeeded in hoisting up a sand shark and it chased everybody on deck around the boat a couple of times before a mate heaved it over the rail.
-buy a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish...
-------------------- All I ask is a wide screen and a projector to light her by...
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