Tuesday, September 22, 2015

The Silky-Smooth Iridescence of September

We starve to spy that early-morning eruption of a certain celebrated fin’s most fervorous form slicing-open the saltwater’s surface.  For that tell-tail glimpse of the splendid Atlantic Speedster’s inshore offensive charging aerially through a placid promise of streaming tide.  We stare and scan with eyes piercing from the overlook of fall’s cool and dampened overnight sand before the propitious renewal of blooming sun-light.  Maybe today, the Fat Albert will manifest from our few hours of fretful sleep in which she provoked our dreams of longing, that by finned-fortune, we may sight the seldom-seen Little Tunny within distant, day-dreaming stares cast asea.  That we may profess upon the sandy alters that are our chosen beaches to inheriting capture of the pelagic False Albacore in celebrated and esteemed, surfcaster-to-surfcaster conversation.  For the reeling revelation of having received Euthynnus alletteratus. 
We wait all-summer-long for her arrival to our near-shore, salt-brined amphitheater.  For the month of September, when the local waters warmed temperate alchemize as those brief seasonal favors - open windows of time and temperature valued most opportune - born of tropical circulations spun off the Gulf Stream, those currents coddled and primed to her physiological preference.  For an ecosystem teeming with Atlantic silverside and bay anchovy that she will forcefully ram-ingest during darting feats of sunrise surface slashes, ones exhibiting her unrivaled predatory speed and majestic leaping predation.  For a cast chance at intercepting her sudden, adrenaline-inciting, porpoise-like breaches teasing at the surf-stranded of spirit much like a perspiring glass of ice-cold water taunting at the imagination to the deliriously parched of thirst.  So we cast mightily, ceaselessly, and far, as far as possible, toward the promise of an oceanic-rising sun, to hopefully, if not eventually, encounter paths crossed with our rapidly-retrieved mold of holographic metal anchovy imitation pulled fast and high behind flourocarbon in the upper-water column for the jarring severity of her unmistakable strike arresting any reel’s winding motion and crushing our rod like a ton of free-falling bricks.  Just, hold, on.  For all that locomotive muscle, for all of her rapidly-beating, fin-pulsating fighting-power will electrify any drifting attention with the sudden shock of a nuclear detonation setting-off deep within your chest, freezing a reflexive, white-knuckled-clenched-grip onto the very intoxicated curve of carbon-fiber straining to subdue her darting, high-speed escape.  This entanglement of exception shall be deemed a personal trial of judgment towards ascending esteemed eminence as a surfcaster.  A most-rare opportunity to proclaim uncommon triumph as a common sand-straddling angler.  As one having been fortunate enough to reveal from beneath a hidden world of waves an exotic fish surging in giant color and evolutionary greatness.  Pound-for-pound, she is a hook-up like no other surf-prowling gamefish we may pursue, running drag harder and louder and stripping line faster than any of her seasonal surf-sought competition dares.  And for this, she steals all passions piscatorial from the dying days of summer, reeling-in these very fleeting desires pouring of our seeking hearts.
So we vow to never squander a water-borne sunrise to chance encounter this smallest member of the family Scombridae, this mackerel masquerading as a member of the true-tuna genus Thunnus, however well-disguised in her flawlessly-verdant brilliance and ventral flashes of pink, silky-smooth-to-the-touch, iridescent sheen.  That hard-to-catch hard-tail painted of a signature vermiculated pattern of upper-dorsal squiggles crowned by a row of free-swaying finlets.  Or that special fish stippled by those distinctive black pelvic dots of four or more over a football-shaped form sheathed by a seemingly scaleless ultra-hydrodynamic luster.  The sea's seasonal bolt of green from the busting blue.  Our opalescent obsession that are those colors revered, reputed, and whole-heartedly understood between strangers of fishermen in sandy beach parking lots as the relishing, pelagic parlance of morning tailgate nomenclature.  After all, it is those of us with the surf’s sand to our feet, however fortunate or few, who already know that there is nothing conceivably false of our transient, lunate-tailed visitor, for a fin by any other name would not fight as sweet.  
That, is no falsehood.











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