Got The Blues, A Nice Mess Of Blues

My new wife Stephanie had never fished before she met me, but she sure learned to enjoy it quickly enough. We were living in Boston but most weekends we drove the fifty odd miles down to New Bedford and stayed at my grandmother's house where my dad lived. We fished the shores of nearby lakes for largemouth bass and pickerel and by summer bought a 12 foot boat and 5 horsepower outboard motor, allowing us to fish the harbor.

We mostly used light spinning tackle with 4 lb. test line and never used natural bait. We fished with 1/4 oz. bucktail jigs which are still my favorite all around lure. For a couple of weekends we'd found small striped bass in the two to five pound range by working the edges of the channel, letting the jig sink to the bottom and working it slowly back to the boat. My grandmother was thrilled to have all the fresh fish and made some of it into gefilte fish, boiled balls of ground fish served cold with horse radish. We'd catch the occasional small cod or pollack, and sometimes a few Atlanic mackerel also.

One morning shortly after daybreak as we were still running out to the channel the water around us turned white with froth, gulls appeared out of nowhere diving down to grab baitfish as the school of small bluefish attacked from below. In maybe ten minutes or so we managed to catch six bluefish. Then it was over. Try as we might we never did locate any striped bass that morning.

This was shot on Ektachrome 120 with my Minolta Autocord. Kodak used to make duplicate slides from 120 that were reduced in size so they'd fit a standard slide projector and this was scanned from one of those faded but still contrasty duplicates. The fish shouldn't look that yellow.