The fall run and a sportsman's sticking point

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Adam Bolonsky
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The fall run and a sportsman's sticking point

Post by Adam Bolonsky »

The Fall Run on Duxbury Bay

First thing Hasselhoff and I did after we landed was put our fish on ice and rinse down our legs with vinegar. If you’ve walked the flats while kayaking Duxbury Bay you need to rinse below the knees. The bay’s outstanding intoxicating biodiversity not withstanding, curse of this place is the parasites that bloom in its waters during the summer. Walk the bay’s shallows as you tow your kayak behind you and inevitably your footfalls stir up the parasites in the mud. Efficient histamine-activators, the parasites’ bites’ byproduct are pencil tip-diameter welts that harden and itch. The vinegar kills the parasites before they have time to bore in.
“You’re kidding,” Hasselhoff said when I uncorked the bottle and tipped out a handful of vinegar.
“I’m not. It’s the only thing that kills them.”
“What’s it called?”
“Locally it’s called clammers itch.”
“Scientific. Give me that bottle.”
I gave it to him and he got to work.
We’d been on the bay’s flats since low tide that a.m. The fall migration of striped bass was underway, the bay alive with striped bass and bluefish feeding on menhaden. We fished the shallows on foot, sledging our kayaks behind us on their bow painters while we cast into the flats’ guzzles and pools. Mostly we caught striped bass, a migratory anadromous fish feeding in the flats’ depressions. When the fish surged forward into deeper water we hopped into our kayaks and chased them. The feeding schools collided in thick layers against the flats’ edges, pushing shivering silversides up onto the sand.
“Slap it on thick,” I said.
We were both pretty much splattered with muck.
“What’s the genus?”
“Dunnow. You mean—”
“The zoological classification. ”
Hasselhoff is a good guy, an ardent fisherman and a terrific paddler, but he’s also the kind of guy who can tell you how many degrees your paddle should be feathered when the wind is blowing x knots, your kayak is model z, and you have eaten a breakfast with a caloric value of mw-v+47%.
“Guy who told me about vinegar called them mud mites.”
He really went to work. Hasselhoff is also rather a fussbudget. Walk through his garage and there he is, following you with a dustpan to sweep up any dirt that might flake off your sneakers. Watching him apply the vinegar I understood why he also always looks like it’s been about three minutes since his last hair cut. The guy is very neat and fastidious.
“Come on, Hasselhoff. It’s a rinse, not a beauty product.”
“For what I pay you for these trips you can afford five minutes.”
He was right. He’d paid me a lot in guiding fees this year.
He appliquéd on about another half micrometer.
“What was that, all of twenty seconds?”

Duxbury Bay’s flats’ embayments contain some of state’s most productive kayak fishing areas, yet the flats’ daily appearance leads many paddlers to categorize the bay unnavigable when the tide is out. But these flats don’t lack for intricate leads and passages between dry sand flats, open water, and wide brocades of sticky muck. We’d paddled Captains Flat, the weed flats off Cordage Park, the flats in the Jones River and those behind Clarks Island by picking our way through tidal streams, creeks, guzzles and drainages. When we reached the Cow Yard where the yard’s grass beds drop off into deep water, the sand and mud swirled past our feet before dropping off over the bank’s edges while schools of fish, flashing in the shallows, fell off over the edge and into the deep water.

The fishing had been good: several schools of stripers under 28”; a half dozen schools of snapper bluefish, finally a ferociously hammering school of offshore bluefish, their heads as big as half-gallon milk cartons, who tore in through Splitting Knife channel, jumped into the air, broke off our gear, and disappeared. Shallow water fishing is one of the more unexpected ways to fish from a seakayak. You spot the fish on a flat — a thrashing, bubbling carpet beneath a hovering flock of screeching terns— and you gamble the fish don’t find their way to the deep water before you get to them. You paddle up to the flat’s edge, pop the sprayskirt, ground the kayak, splash through the shin-deep water and begin your casts.
Hasselhoff was still powdering himself with the vinegar.
“Come on, Hasselhoff!”
“Last time you saw a client catch many fish,” he said, “you were in dreamland.”

Trussed up within the gear bag in the back of his truck lay a striped bass the size of a tavern fire log. Three bluefish lay on ice in his cooler. He’d also released two-and-a-half dozen undersized fish.
“And you woke up last time you saw a client catch a striper that big.”

He’d taken the keeper after casting towards a swirl in the water that blossomed off my stern with a tail slap so loud I thought Hasselhoff had fallen out of his boat. Guides want their clients to land big things, whether waves, air or fish, but I was envious. I’ve fished Duxbury’s flats nine years, four on other’s dimes, and have never landed a big fish there as big as his. Not a bad day, this. The water had been about 62 F. The sun, lower in the sky than it was in summer, made the bay glitter like a field of diamonds when we paddled back to the put-in at day’s end.

* * *

If there is any true emotion in catching fish from a kayak, it’s this. When striped bass feed with their characteristic assiduous purpose in thick weedbeds, they are rather helpless. The weeds impede their progress; some fish get lost in the embayments; when a school scatters and disperses, the stragglers look vulnerable as they nose back and forth in water as shallow if not shallower than their girth. The fish less swim than wander in and out of the oddly slick texture of the thickened water, and roll over on their sides as unmindful of the angler as an insect on its back on a kitchen counter. The fish cannot thrash. They cannot display that predatory aggressiveness which breaks deeper water into a froth. The prey they chase cannot scatter in the air. The scene lacks that violence which otherwise justifies a hook. The weeds and eel-grass trap both baitfish and the fish. One thinks of flies in amber, of animals in quicksand.

What Hasselhoff and I saw at end of day, especially east of Clarks Island, even more so in the throat of the Jones River, were fish that, even there, in the grass, were trying to feed in anticipation of their migration back to the waters of the mid-Atlantic. Striped bass and bluefish vacate Massachusetts before the winter kill-off sets in. Meanwhile they form v-shaped wakes on the water’s surface. They get stuck in the low water, as if in syrup. Hasselhoff and I had not talked much when we paddled among the fish in the weedbeds. Paddling among them seemed unfair.

In the eel grass behind Clarks Island and in the throat of the Jones River is where I usually deliver my canned little talk about clammers itch and mud mites and vinegar, if only to keep the hooks sheathed in the foam blocks on the foredeck. Whether I successfully distract depends upon whether I really feel prepared to convey that we shouldn’t witness such helplessness without feeling that we don’t belong there. Sometimes it’s embarrassing, with other anglers, to witness what is a fish’s essential nakedness. On the weed and grass flats, you see most clearly how vulnerable a feeding fish is. You see, too, how overmatched a fish is when it’s stalked in shallow waters by a kayak angler whose instincts can turn no less base, focused, remorseless and quick. Or so the moral equation might suggest when one takes the time so suss it.

“Thanks for the day, guy,” Hasselhoff finished. “Too bad I caught the biggest fish.” Then he gave me the bottle of vinegar, got into his truck, and headed out of the landing area.
I had his cash in my wallet. So it all balanced, I guess.

copyright 2006/spb
getnoutside
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Post by getnoutside »

Great report Adam... thanks for sharing. Now I'm itchin' to get back on the bay and catch me another fish
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Todd
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Post by Todd »

Adam wrote
The vinegar kills the parasites before they have time to bore in.

Steve wrote
Now I'm itchin' to get back on the bay and catch me another fish


Steve, be careful and don't get caught up with a jelly or Man-O-War. They don't use vinegar for those.
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