Chris Maroldy
It’s a good thing you don’t need to be much of a sailor to be a decent fisherman. I get green around the gills fishing outside the jetties. Big boat, little boat; it doesn’t matter. A run offshore will put me flat on my back. My Uncle Don was my primary saltwater teacher and a college professor, but he was a slow learner on this score. It only took him about 25 years before he quietly quit asking me on any trip where we were going to ride any swells.
And no sea legs isn’t my only problem. I once lost at least two, possibly three anchors for my Uncle Mike, though why he thought a 10-year-old could finesse the throttle of a 28- or 30-foot cabin cruiser while he pulled line I couldn’t tell you. The experience put me permanently off claiming any captaining ability whatsoever.
Yeah, call me damaged on the sailor dealio, but I am a *decent* fisherman. (Also extremely good-looking.)
Maybe there’s some level of *great* sailor that correlates however loosely with being a *great* fisherman, but I’ll never be accused of that latter, so I don’t bother contemplating the far reaches of the spectrum much. But I will throw out for your consideration my observation that the overlap between “elite” and “loony” in so many fields is not zero. So it’s not like I’ve never given what it takes to be a great angler any thought at all.
And I don’t really object to being lumped in with loonies in the first place, so I have that goin’ for me, which is nice. I suspect I’ve been pegged there in a few categories by a few people. But fishing is probably not one of my most notorious lunatic pursuits, or at least it hasn’t been for a long time.
But when it was…Hoo, boy! Back then, I associated fishing greatness with passion and effort, and I had both of those nailed. So for a while, I was a great fisherman, at least in my own head.
But then I kinda cooled my jets.
This is not to say I’m not crazy about fishing anymore. I am, when I can devote my attention to it. I guess that means my love could be crazy, but it’s not cray-cray.
Instead…
Somewhere along the way, I decided to get very much more serious about my hunting—maybe around the same time it was dawning on me that the ultimate fishing boat was far out of my reach, and would be for some time.
Maybe the thought process was that without the gung-ho gear, I could only achieve a token level of fanaticism. And without being fanatical, how could one be great? Because being a great fisherman isn’t only about ability, right? I never doubted my ability. (“They’re just not biting … It’s not that I suck at fishing—I’m a die-hard! And I have *most* of the gear to prove it!”)
But not all.
So maybe that’s why my attention shifted to the woods from the water, and so did my money and my free time. It’s not that I lost interest in fishing; more like I stopped thinking of myself as a “great” angler just because I was a die-hard. With some age on me now, looking back, I knew some great anglers, and they were not Me.
When they’re talking about your fishing exploits as you’re about to go in the ground, you were a great fisherman. I told a lot of people about the time Uncle Don ran us out to Three Mile Reef in his lowly little Grumman skiff, and many of them had their own stories about him.
And so I have contented myself lately with the verdict that—so far—I have been a decent fisherman, but not a great one. I suppose there’s still some time left. But what you once were, at 14, or 24, is not what you are … many years later.