The Fisherman's Winter

“The true fisherman approaches the first day of fishing with the same sense of wonder and awe of a child approaching Christmas.” Robert Travers, Trout Madness (1960)

As December prepares to get serious, I ponder the long days and hard nights before my next fair weather fishing trip.

Fishermen follow a pattern that is similar to baseball players. We awake and begin our season in the spring with hopes of a long, great season.

We experience the beauty of summer as we toil under the hot sun. We go as deep into the autumn as Mother Nature and our abilities will carry us. We fill our winter with thoughts of missed opportunities and glorious victories.

Some seasons end with legendary success, some end in a tangled mess. You must learn to roll with both if you are to be successful over time.

There is meaning in our rituals. We prepare our equipment with care, we study our opponents with fierce determination, we rise to the early sun and talk about strategy with our colleagues.

All of this provides a soft poetry to a sometimes-brutal sporting activity.

The winter of a fisherman is long and full of surreal, haunting dreams. There are dreams of mighty fish and hearty fights, some won and some lost.

We always we dream of the fight. You do not “play” fishing. They will bite you.

Fishermen and baseball players always think of next year. We phone each other on long, cold nights and discuss techniques and plan trips.

We do not sleep well this time of year. We are tortured by rumors of herring at the Canarsie Pier on the coldest days of January.

Some men I know talk of overnight cod trips to the canyon in the dead of winter.

Heated rails indeed. This is not my type of fishing.

When you are hooked, you are hooked. Fishing is a sport that can drive you mad. But when the sun is shining and the water is good, you really want to be just one place. The ocean.

Each Spring the water comes back to life with generations of fishermen, old and new casting dreams upon the water.

Skinny flounder move into bays and inlets that warm quickly and schoolie striped bass begin their annual migration down the Hudson River to the ocean in late March and early April.

The first real reports of fish come right around opening day of baseball.

Spring will come again. I just know it will.