A couple of friends called telling me it was time to go fishing and they’d pick me up at 4:15.
I hesitated.
I’m not quite sure why all this manly shit has to happen so early in the morning.
But Miss Carol pushed me out the door and there I was, bouncing over the Atlantic swells in the pre-dawn darkness hunting fish. On wrecks. There were four of us and the other three had decided we needed to sidestep the rockfish tournament boats and head north to fish the wrecks for sea bass.
That’s cool, I’m good with that, I’ve never done it, so hey?
So we get out there and come to find out wreck fishing is a LOT like fishing off a bridge except the bridge is 40 miles offshore and you’re in a couple of hundred feet of water. But it’s just as boring. You’re bobbing the bottom and hoping you catch something before you snag the wreck and spend an hour freeing your line. It’s fishing gone super annoying- kinda like trying to watch porn while your wife talks to you.
I love to fish but I wasn’t ready for this shit. The reason I go offshore is to catch fish that’re wildly athletic and as big or bigger than you are. When you hook up you’re in for a fight. So bobbing for tiny sea bass just wasn’t doing it for me. Add to it that when you catch one, chances are it’s undersized and it’s stomach has expanded choking it and when you throw it back you watch it slowly bob on the surface dying and I’d had enough after about an hour.
And don’t even get me started on the dogfish. Dogfish are 2-5′ sharks that haunt the wrecks and eat EVERYTHING, especially your tackle. You sink three baited hooks and when you snag a dogfish it somehow manages to roll up into all the tackle on the way up so you’re confronted with a toothy snarling piece of dogfish shithead and after one or two you feel like just cutting the whole mess loose and let Mr. Dogfish swim around for the rest of his life wrapped up in hooks and monofilament.
But you don’t.
You wrestle with him and pull all the shit out of him and slide him back into the water and curse him.
So anyway. After an hour or so I was over it. Wreck fishing sucks. So I stopped and started drinking beer which was a problem since I hadn’t bought any because WHO KNEW you couldn’t buy beer at 4:30 in the morning in Virginia?
Not me.
Finally the other guys got sick of wreck fishing and me drinking their beer and decided to head inshore for striper. I thought inshore meant running back down our outbound track but I was waaaay wrong.
It meant a 90 mile run to Kitty Hawk NC. I was sooo happy.
We got down and set a spread and finally got into them about a half hour before we had to run for home. After 14 hours of fishing, in 12 minutes of wildly intense catching we’d caught our limit.
And we were all friends again.
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