A Fishing Tale Needing No Exaggeration
By Michael Griffin
There’s a marina alongside a busy highway that I have occasion to pass. Every time I do, I have a warm recollection of the time I spent on boats during my childhood.
I grew up fishing every summer in New Jersey on Long Beach Island (known to locals as LBI). It was your basic summer island — people would swarm onto it every June until late August. My parents’ house was in Barnegat Light on the very far left end of the island. It had the island’s main tourist attraction, the lighthouse, which could be seen from our dining room table.
I’d love to go near the lighthouse and watch the boats sail out to sea, then watch them return to the jetty. As happy as I was to see the lighthouse each day, it looked more wonderful when lit up at night.
My father started an annual summer tradition of chartering a boat with a group of friends and family members as their main fishing excursion each summer. The tradition started when I was too young to go, so I’d impatiently wait for dad to come home with his catch. Finally, I reached the age where I could go, and I was so excited — here was a rite of passage. Yet I almost quit when I found out we needed to wake up before dawn!
These summer charter excursions felt almost like Christmas Eve, as every year I’d look to the sky at dusk the night before. As every mariner knows, I was looking for that telltale red hue — “red sky at night, sailor’s delight.” Mother Nature and luck were always on our side, as the worst weather we ever experienced was a cloudy day.
Boating wasn’t just about fishing. That was hard since I was a skinny kid who had to eat a lot to break 120 pounds. There was something about looking out over the waters and the sky as the boat bobbed and swelled in the waves. The sounds of the boat creaking and the water lapping were soothing, and there was the invigorating scents of salt air and the chum the mates tossed overboard to attract fish (OK, maybe not that second part).
I was mesmerized making the two-hour trek out into the Atlantic Ocean. When I sat in the back of the boat, I’d watch the patterns of the wakes churned by the boat’s powerful engines; when in the captain’s quarters, I’d gaze out past the bow at the never-ending horizon.
As you can tell, my memories are largely positive, though there was the time a family friend decided to come along. He thought he was a veteran boater, as he enjoyed kayaking. His body disagreed, turning green almost as soon as the mates loosened the last slip rope, and keeping that same hue for about eight hours. Remarkably, he became a new man as soon as his feet hit dry land.
By the 1990s I’d gone to college, living away. My time on boats ceased. However, there was one last hurrah for the LBI crew in the summer of 2001. On the verge of my turning 30, several college and work friends joined along with some of my father’s old group. We were still relatively carefree — Y2K had come and gone and we didn’t know September 11 lay ahead. I relished the wind and the waves like I used to, and nobody got sick.
I haven’t been able to replicate that carefree feeling since, though cruising has kept me connected to the water. Recently, I find my summer boating memories aren’t quite tucked away — they are beckoning to be recreated with a new generation. My son is getting older; soon I might feel comfortable having him go out on a fishing excursion. I want to see his face as he experiences the sights, sounds, and other pleasures of the sea. I’ll just have to make sure he feels as calm and at ease on a boat as his dad does. A short practice run or two might be in order, as eight hours out to sea is a long time to see a green face.
