Fishing For Pickerel, Catching Perch ~ 1965

That first year that Stephanie and I were married we discovered a lot of things about one another. We'd only met a few days before we got married on December fourth, 1964, mid winter in Boston. She didn't know that I had a passion for fishing and I had no idea that she'd never fished before. Came spring time and I gave her some basic casting lessons at the park.

Anybody who's ever done much fishing knows that all fish aren't trophy size and you don't always catch fish. Come opening day of the fishing season and Stephanie managed to land a 5 lb. 14 oz. largemouth bass, along with a mess of smaller ones and several yellow perch. A week later she caught a 5 lb. pickerel. They were all caught with a bucktail jig on 4 lb. test line. She'd caught the fever! We spent our weekends fishing!

I'd already I sold my Honda motorcycle and bought a '64 Volkswagen. We started looking for a boat. When we found this 12 foot Penn Yan we both fell in love with it. The canvas covering was bright red and the varnished cedar planking with ash ribs on the inside made it look like a piece of fine furniture. It cost us $120 and it lived atop the VW for several years.

Stephanie might have been the one to catch all the big fish but I kept trying. Here's a shot she took of me in the old New Bedford Resevoir with a white perch. See! I could catch fish! They were just a lot smaller than the ones that she caught. She was using our "fishing camera", an old Minolta Autocord that went on to photograph several hundred weddings before I sold it for more than I'd paid for it.

More Fishy Business Going On

The average American would be just as happy if he never ate fish. Maybe a tuna salad sandwich once in awhile. Our Moms always told us "Fish is good for you!" and called it "brain food". "It'll make you smart!" they told us. Compared to meat fish was cheap. The Catholic Church for years said that you couldn't eat meat on Fridays. The schools served tuna glop over rice or the reviled tuna salad sandwich for lunch. Mom would follow up with frozen fish sticks for dinner. Yuck!

The average American wants white meat bland tasting fish. Neighborhood fish markets closed up as the first generation European immigrants died off and their daughters discovered canned tuna and frozen fish sticks. They didn't have to go in a smelly market and see all those glazed-over eyes staring back at them out of the bins of crushed ice, no watching the guy eviscerating their cold little bodies, cutting off their heads, slicing the remains crosswise into steaks, or perhaps cutting the meat from the bones, trimming off the skin, and ending up with a nice pair of boneless fillets. Best of all they didn't have to do all this yucky stuff themselves. Supermarkets took over the fresh fish trade, but it was rarely really fresh, certainly not caught that morning, and likely not caught any more recently than three or four days ago. Fresh fish doesn't taste fishy. Supermarket fish tastes fishy.

You could always drive over to the Haulover Marina docks when the charter boats and head boats come in and buy fresh fish. Some days, of course, the fishing was lousy and there were no fish. A wasted trip!

North Miami was getting an increasing percentange of new residents, mostly from the Carribean, and Captain Jim Hanson saw opportunity knocking. Thousands of families were moving into the area with a tradition of eating fish, not beef. He opened his Seafood Market on West Dixie Highway. Fresh fish were back. Really fresh fish.

Capt. Al's Jig Factory ~ And Some Odds And Ends

I'm going to do the odds and ends first. I rarely get comments on my posts except as emails, and then mostly from people that I already know. This morning I had four comments. One was from Bill Clark wanting to know why I wasn't posting anymore on the photo.net Leica forum. Bill, I got kicked off. It seems that some of the friends of the forum's "owners" though that I was becoming too popular. A guy named Brad Evans was my biggest detractor and I think a lot of the forum regulars figured that out. He's a friend of the management over there.

Another comment saying that he enjoyed my photos and reading my unpredictable little essays came from Rob Hall in Munich, Germany. The other two were signed "anonymous". One gentleman said how much he enjoyed the blog while the second related how he used to go to that YMCA on N.W. 17th Ave. back in the 1970's, and it brought back some pleasant memories. That's the post with the map of North Miami. Thanks, guys, for your comments!

I love fishing with bucktail jigs and a few months ago I wrote about it here: http://thepriceofsilver.blogspot.com/2006/10/bounty-of-fish-in-north-biscayne-bay.html If you do a google search for "bucktail jig" "al kaplan" you'll get some other links. In this photo I'm actually tying some pink and white hair on a 1/4 ounce lead jig head. I made the lap desk a bunch of years ago so I could sit outside while I'm doing it. That way all the little bits of hair can just be swept off the porch into the grass where it'll decompose. It's supposedly rich in nitrogen and makes good fertilizer. I usually just do this first thing in the morning when it's still cool out, but a few folks I know from my fishing club all called within days of one another desperate for jigs "yesterday". This included well known fishing guide Dave Kostyo who runs charters for tarpon, sailfish, and a bunch of other species aboard his boat Knot Nancy, and a couple who are avid amateurs and the wife decided that I should make up a dozen of a special color combination that she wanted to try, a chartreuse back with a white belly. I need to give her a call and find out how well they worked. Then my old friend Parks Masterson from Hopkins-Carter Marine down by the Miami River wanted a dozen in all black. For a week I was out there every morning making jigs, drinking my morning coffee, and smoking cigarettes until the sun got too hot. Now they all have their jigs and I made up a bunch of extras while I was doing it.