An Old-School World

I live in a world of moving water, line squalls, secret spots and gruff charter skippers who aren’t afraid to holler and curse, occasionally at paying customers.

- William Sisson

This is a world of southwest winds, new moons, shoestring eels, silver eels, alewives, porgies and live menhaden. It is a landscape dotted with lighthouses and foghorns, double humps and tide rips, sandbars, mussel bars, deep ruts and bright, windy flats where handsome, light-colored fish grub and gorge on sand eels, silversides and crabs.

Worm hatches in the salt ponds in spring, wet-wading under meteor showers in summer, drifting the passage reef on harvest moons, and wool socks and watch caps in the rips of late November, when all the fish are bright, voracious travelers, racing the season and the stars to who knows where. It is the chaotic serenade of a gull rookery and those scrubby little islands smelling of nesting cormorants. Fireflies, heat lightning, June bugs, cold beer.

The southeast gales drive big fish in tight if you know the right beaches, and on still nights in the back bay the mosquitoes and no-see-ums eat you alive, right through your damp shirt, DEET be damned, as fish powder a green and white streamer.