They're Coming

They’re coming.  With every successive sunrise piercing from the Atlantic, spilling skyward the brightly blooming hues of hypnosis over first-light’s ombré canvas of cobalt-blue quietude.  By every swallowing of sight’s colors in sinking sun-set.  With every hourly move of an ambitiously-rising and counter of a rhythmically-receding current breathing of this seasonally-cooling, steely-grey tide.  By all rolling waves thrust ashore, those tirelessly sculpting our shorelines in crashing spray and tumbling thunders of splash.  With earnest, as the earlobe-biting whistle of a signaling season’s northwest- borne whisk and whirl of wind descends.  The sensing waters, infinite and deep and mercurial, ripple in vibration to her approaching pulses of wave.  Those scales of millions pushing ahead and slipping-through a season’s chilling cauldron of water.  Of salt shedding the smothered affection of a many summer sun’s courting.  A sea, mature of life, cradling in suspension the striped-multitudes glimmering of gold and green.  Those collagenous filaments of dorsals, responsive and raised, surreptitiously-seeking, pillaging, and barraging.  Ones cleaving through the life-blood of her element, morning by morning, night by night, mile by migrating mile.  The schooling constellation of her every spilling turn in an undersea infestation of viridescence.  There sway the silhouettes of standing dorsals and splayed caudals shoaling within the jade-green barrels breaking over bars.  Those rolling waves cast ashore giving glints of light that reveal the silence of her color caught within a vacuous stare angled asea.  Fluid movements.  Nature’s orchestral order, observed.  A timbre, resonating in the heart of the surf-afflicted's soul.  For this natural steeping of life and time, seen swirling in a perfect tincture of opportunity.  For this viridescent splendor of October.  This migration of Morone.  This season of Sax.

Walk-Off Fish

First "pitch" and I sent one over the wall for a walk-off solo shot.  The river wall.. And after a long game of play under the cast of night lights, various pitching changes made and designated swimmers called into action, the scored simply ended 1-0 in a home team win over the Striped visitors.  All it ever takes is one raised fish, no matter the size (or even shape!) to change the game.  A win will always be a win.

 

On a dissimilar field of dreams tonight, the Chicago Cubs pulled-off an epic series comeback, winning 3 consecutive do-or-die games over the week, taking the final game 7 of the 112th World Series with a score of 8-7 in suspenseful extra-innings.  Their historic, 108-year clubhouse dry-spell was victoriously showered in champagne, finally.  For the Cubs, it was a win unlike any other win.  A tide, however seasonally-challenging, favored in delivering destiny.  However microcosmic in comparison, it's that exact tide of favor that every fisherman who swings graphite into the night hopes to one-day find himself standing ready for.  Ready to steal his own game 7 victory from the hold of night.

Portrait of Perfection

There are those found inspired by nightfall’s surge of darkness that suddenly swallows all failing shades and shadows of daylight.  The rock-hoppers.  The fence climbers.  The skishing wet-suiters.  The wader-clad.  All those who motion and daydream throughout light of day, but live to mobilize during this magic hour of metamorphosis.  This reactive catalyst they know as sunset.  That spilling span of time when the covert cadres grow stirred by incitement for the holding sea’s most coveted fortune dressed of fins.  For Sax, the preeminent inshore piscatorial portrait of perfection, whose very migratory manifestations brave as the swimming envy of their every neglected exchange of nocturnal retrieve and prelude of sudden, striking anticipation. 

The rod-wielding advantaged arrive all points framed of seawater to disappear from sight, save a headlamp’s faraway blink of light unmasking perfect strangers standing with the night.  Fellow-fishers honoring homage at the forefront of their chosen sandy alters.  Their sanctuaries of giving generosity that with flooding tides, are blanketed by the cover of lapping waters inundating the fringes of surf-carved slopes.  There, entrenched amongst the rhythmic chorus of gravel and stones churning and sands seething, they wait for just one brief encounter when the Atlantic’s divine-denizen may be momentarily revealed from such underwater expanses of her briny extremities to lay deathly still upon the terra firma fraction of a foreign world pierced of starlight and Orion overseeing all high above.  They imagine the scaly sight of her gleaming green glamor to again fall reflected upon the gaze of their hungered, hunting eyes.  These envisions all the same that thousands upon thousands exert so many countless hours of in-pursuit, only for those so few glorious seconds borne as hovering witness.  Sax, their shining trophy.  A mount suitable for the mantle of memory.

So each does what he knows best.  He casts.  He casts, again.  And yet, again.  He casts such that triumph may again saturate his eyes in scaly accents of oceanic-going lavender atop those thick shoulders shimmering of a glittering gold.  He wets line for those seven black, laterally-running stripes segmenting a broad viridescent body’s gradient of moss-green washing away to white.  He wades closer towards a haunting memory luring to ensure that only the most crazed and afflicted remain awake for through all hours and minutes of an autumn or winter night.  Wading and waiting for that one, preferred incident of tidal rendezvous.  He accepts, as an adamant angler in a state of sleep-deprived stupor, that he may languish in withering-away, suddenly seeing double-vision of the graphite accomplice held before him, knowing full-well there exists no chance of hooking a double-header, but casts again, to only try.  He reties, for the glory of reliving a moment that was lived yesteryear.  For the next cast made that will fall closer in closing sigma’s statistically-probable, enuring curve of time, before enduring the next startling tug.  He switches colors, for the hope of seeing the inconceivable.  For the surprise and thrill of surfacing a new personal-best.  He readies himself for the shaking-satisfaction of lying her wet, long broad body onto sand, while making visual contact of her golden-colored iris rotating towards his own, as a skinny rush of bubbling water passes around her alabaster-colored belly, only to stall upon the beach slope and then retreat to sea.  To photograph the Atlantic’s prized daughter, pulled aground upon dark and hard-packed, smoothened sand.

It’s the picture of such a moment thus captured in his mind, raised of his hands and hoisted ashore by hook, which keeps him reeling in the night.  The torpedo-shaped portrait, embodied of time and tide, slice of moon and ceiling of cloud, buffet of bait and blow of wind, water of chilling and luck of locating, is ultimately, where this collision of sea will have confessed her best-held secrets unto sand.  As Sax.  As a sculptured snap-shot freeze-framed in his mind forever.  As a streamlined benefit tail-slapping the glass-smooth, saturated sands of a beach.  All, for pursuit of recreation.  All, in the name of chasing picture-perfect dreams worthy of re-creation.

"Joe's Bench"

A plaque memorializing the legacy of a fallen-fisher was dedicated onto a riverside bench in Sea Bright waiting for the interest of all and any.  However firm at rest, its concrete frame and cemented foundation didn't stand a chance at surviving through the raging and ruinous night that was October 29, 2012. 

I never met Joe.  I'd like to imagine he was a fine, elderly man who awarded those he met with a warm and anesthetic sense of kindness, impressed time with nostalgic, neighborly manners, perfect strangers a welcoming smile, and as a angling companion, one who interrupted silence on the water with his many tales of bygone fish stories.  Eras of time I can only envision in colors sepia or black & white.  Lazy days of his youth that swept by like the tide rolling before his feet, off to the depths of elsewhere, but always seen to return with the memorable clarity of hope in existence.  The water he knew, as another returning flood of churning prosperity.  His presence before it, as the life-giving indulgence to intercept, wrangle, and reel-in another tail.  And with that, another tale, from Joe. 

May we all, one day, be judged as big enough to keep.

  

Evidence

Hunter's Moon

May the fortunate fishers among us be those whose eye's wander skyward to elope with the silvery Hunter’s Moon and whose thoughts arise from a silhouette of shadow to reflect within the soft shower of her chalky light.  That autumnal anglers absorb those salty seconds of silence prescribed as the remedying tonic of time spent wading hip-deep in this seasonally-cooling and clear, briny bath of October's bringing.  The ancient apothecary of saltwater we so habitually and dearly seek to benefit a humbling renewal of spirit.  Tonight, most especially, under the fully-rounded face and cratered celestial charm of our seleno-saucer's captivating companionship admired somewhere overhead.

Excerpt in illustration is that of author Rich Murphy - Fly Fishing for Striped Bass (2007). 

Sturdy Tails Has September

It comes but once a year, those thirty dreamy days of September.  The long-awaited “local’s summer” that welcomes a different face of tourists to the surfcaster’s town.  It’s an all-too-brief, but coveted splash of time, when the angling lunate-lunatic leers and lunges to engage in methods of combat-fishing with anxious heaves of tin and crossed-line retrieves of frenzy at the very sight of those porpoising pelagic fish glazed-over in green backs bursting airborne.  Those targets of piscatorial passion rapidly racing to assault the many hapless Anchovies and Silversides they prey. 

So with it, hardly was wasted a balmy afternoon’s outgoing ebb ripping seaward through The Hook’s Rip for those hard-fighting, but hard-to-hook, hard-tails.  The summertime swimmers whose uncommon names of Fat Albert or Spanish Mack  and even Jack Crevalle are of a celebrity status to the cluster of graphite and fiberglass poles of paparazzi slinging.  Those anxiously repositioning or excitedly aiming, cramming closer among that one lucky reel emptying and singing. 

            This year, with the arrival of an early-season Nor’easter as the thirtieth sunset sets, we may faintly lament, knowing all good things must come to a tail-end.  Twenty-minute barefoot treks in bathing suits through Fisherman’s Trail will soon be waived for waders instead, but with the colorful benefaction of contentment, most must agree that the sturdy tails of September have again treated us well. 

This is a beautiful time of year to celebrate cool, crisp-air nights, dwindling humidity, and free-of-charge, wide-open beach access come daybreak.  With any luck, just one more pelagic will make it up a slope of sand or slide of slimy rock as an autumnal surprise. 

Now, as the first sunrise of October is nearest, the surfcaster is yet furthest from the tale-end of a season..

Always, For More

It always begins the same.

Some morning, his feet will disappear into a turbid and shallow, leg-lapping tide of April.  Somewhere from a stone-strewn sand or mucky, marl marsh flat or tidal-weed-washed or dead-reed-framed shoreline along the Raritan’s lower reaches.

There, his fingertips will wriggle and wrangle to wedge under a familiar flap’s sewn hem, prying for a firm-enough grip to its skin of Dacron sailcloth.  Squeezing for a bond that may finally silence the enduring tensions of time and encourage an unfolding pull upward.  One that will suddenly saturate the surrounding salty air with its distinct tearing-sound of Velcro’s virtue roaring awake, as if it were perceived with the similar signature of alertness heeded to the solid, deep snapping and splintering of timber beginning to fall.  Unstoppable change, set in-motion. 

For him, these few parting seconds of time are nothing more than one man’s proclamation of revival and return.  Of a stirring seasonal apogee of time and tide, now steadfast turned in favor.  For the spoils of a long-awaited emergence from a hibernal abyss and its cold clasping confines of wintertide emptiness.  For his spirit’s resultant submergence into an aqueous realm of springtide abundance and Nature’s forthcoming draw of curtain to fill his eyes with her dreamy colors of genesis. 

Sounded is one surfcaster’s startling crack of thunder, heard rolling and rumbling across the many distant and untried dunes of sandy shoreline signaling his return like a sudden change in the weather.  A storm, soon enough, that will rain of cascading casts slicing, air whisking, driving downpouring descents of bodies plastic and metal and wood, splashing distant seawater with a rhythm of raining dimples and rings emanating and promises piercing.  The air of the sea, punctured by this angler’s ambush of sound, sweeps over a liquid layer of quietude.  His surf bag, is opened.  Finally fallen awash in the orange-colored glisten of early light, he eyes its deep row of tubes lined with the trebled testaments of dependable color and form.  A pretense of reflection for what is to now ensue over the giving months ahead.

Inhaled alas, is the momentous moment when shadows finally fold down to this precipitous pouring of light, where sight seeks the unseen, withheld somewhere under the glassy gleam of glints and march of riffles, as time generously unravels from within the curling wave, and in his mind, everything seems split-open with the immutable and indelible gestures of remembrance.

He pauses to muse, in that it’s simply the separating sound of a fabric tearing apart that has welcomed him back the many fathoms of time and miles of memory.  But far more, it’s one accompanying his suddenness stirring in thought and action.  Again, for more.  One ordinarily insignificant, inconsequential, and inconsiderable detail of routine that will otherwise incite the many memories of his wading in the stirring foam of a sea that may again flood through his mind as it does over his body with the sudden and invigorating intensity of one of her fallen, rushing wave’s cast ashore does seethe and storm over his ankles.  As witness, born anew of her unflinching temperament.  For more, again. 

By parting ways of a fabric, he imparts a solidarity in these parting seconds with the fabric of realization that is his common existence unfolding anew.  Always, for more. 

And so it is heard. By virtue of finned-fortune and the contribution of his unpredictable, seaward-seeking footfall, it’ll never end the same.

Excerpt from Where The Sky Is Born

Posting a picture that exemplifies the "drooping drop of dew."  A ball of light, "falling upwards" into the sky.  Below is an excerpt from my post titled Where The Sky Is Born

"The welcoming bath of dawn, consummating in sunrise, will be a special moment to savor, to taste upon my salty spirit.  I will be amongst those who have witnessed this unfolding metamorphosis evolve from the blackness of night to the very last second when the burning gaseous orb, refracting orange celestial light about its wiggling periphery, ascends above the faraway horizon, slowly breaking tangential contact of its lower arc from the sea like that of a drooping drop of morning dew, stretching from the tip of a leaf before slipping away, breaking free.  The sun, at last, will have been released to orbit the sky yet again.  A day rebirthed anew."

Anticipation

During the month of June, we wait.  We watch and walk and cast and scan afar.  For the busting splashes made to balled-up Bunker.  For the dark bands of baitfish pressed upon the shallows of a beach.  Those invigorating invitations made in heavy pursuit by the migratory giants we hope to lure into surface-popping explosion.  For the music of our reels to sound in the soothing ballads of battle between tugging man and fighting fish.

Shadow of Doubt

Going too many nights fishless has cast a shadow of doubt upon my judgement.  Well, at least upon my dreams.  I know, that with the right tide, Stripes will always be near.  Or even nearer.

Guided

Through the eye-lets of my guides I let my eyes guide me before the waters calling at my heart with her many invitations of trickle and memory and mystery.  Always mystery..

Fin-ality

Some dormant and unshakable fiber of man’s being, abetting deepest from the primordial rungs linking the double-helix-shaped ladder of life itself, one imperceptible of a faraway prominence of morality, one darker than the barren, beady pupils of his scanning and squinting sight, rests tainted with a rooted desire to kill that which exists wildly in Nature.  That which roams elsewhere, somewhere, yet somehow, amidst the range of his own conceivable world, whether openly-seen or estimated in the unknown.  That which he knows to be evermore dominant in form or elegant in appeal or naturally-majestic than he could ever physically claim or imaginatively hope or suggestively strive to be, but nevertheless, lurking undetectable below the shallow surface of skin that surreptitiously masquerades his civilized mannerisms, dwell these haunting and immutable remnants of his once-atavistic survival mechanisms of past, his primitively hard-wired leanings, a wildly-determinate proto-programming clawing to advise his rudimentary inclinations that he unshed mystery and domesticate any said death-dealing thought to any said waiting creature of fin or fur or feather from the spheres of his own existence, those stirred from that innermost dimension of his ravenously-seeking mind, or even benefit a subconsciously-clenching vestige affirming the incarnate chomping contours of his pointed prehensile canines, for as he sees, it can only subsist as fur-hide or scale-wrapped compromise, this faraway contention of game-sport subjugated to merely consummate his own satisfying sense of self-dominance and professed masculinity within a competing world of predatory rivalry.  A prize, as he sees, defining the overestimated value of his very own self-worth and fixated importance of an assumed or self-imposed contest amongst the spying eyes and trying hands of fellow mankind. 

He hunts the hunter, lowering himself into the hunted’s world, such that by agony of such stalking consequence, the bearing of any said beast’s breath, that incomprehensible, yet empathetic exhalation that is cosmically-ordained common-life shared amongst the very inhalations with man himself, one violently heaving for mercy in a pitiless, smearing extirpation of bleeding-blood, one tormented in an asphyxiating finality of foaming bubbles of mouth agape, becomes stolen, its surging pulse forever stalled of wicked and wayward privilege, as it bears burden, and as he hovering witness, to one last writhing twist or percussed, slapping strike of tail or soaring, visceral moan or earth-tearing slash of hoof.  A pitiful finality consummating by way of an ancient conception born from the emergent turn of time and life’s carnivorous collision thereof, that as these eyes see it, is the silhouette of man strengthened by the rigor mortis of conquest, an exalted and exclaimed delusion of dominance only to perish immediately itself, one muted by the deafness of a world disinterested.  A world infinitely larger than the parameter of his mind’s mirage of purpose purports.  A world one-less punctuated by the miraculous grandeur of sinew’s sinuous living color. One less lowly or removed victim from a universal transcendence.

For he is hunter. He is savage beast himself, grown stained and weighted with the sticky, salty smear of a sanguine-silence bleeding outward unto his own dying stillness of reason.  He is man.  The ungodly proctor of flesh’s fate and peerless purveyor of death.

A Thank-You, From The Blog Author

I would like to offer my appreciation and gratitude for those readers who may have revisited this "blog," if only once, since my last post made in October '15.  Last spring saw the christening of this website and with it, my eagerness to share in words some of the more cherished experiences I found born as a result of saltwater angling, oceanic sunrises, and wet sand.

As a writer, it is my hope that most or many or some or perhaps only one of my authored experiences and endlessly embellished expressions of seaside observation that represent my own embodiment as a surfcaster (however verbose you may regard!) may have struck a ringing, harmonious chord of similarity within you.  That sometime in your angling past, you may have cast vicariously through my words and walked sympathetically upon similar sands, seeking the same ends as myself.  It is what whets our appetite for the nourishment of Nature and makes us each eager for more.  For the next time.  For the allure of Her unknown and the inestimable possibilities thereof.  Oh, and fish!

Professionally, life has kept me busier than ever, as I'm burrowed deep with full & part-time work and other consuming obligations, but those ever-present, imaginative anticipations I have of fishing the salt, and welcoming any number of Nature's inspirations that may suddenly or unexpectedly wash over me, leading to words that I may scribble on paper, are what I look forward to most in 2016.  I apologize for allowing over half a year's time to pass with no new posted content.  I have dozens of ideas and incomplete narratives and drafts and half-written pieces patiently awaiting the polished touches of finality.  It's my hope that with the grace of time I can share them with you.

With that, I invite you to visit from time to time, much like an unfamiliar, but appealing stretch of morning beach you auspiciously walk upon, not for the flurry of writing you will have to catch-up on, but that I may have cast-out some new and exciting arrangement of words waiting to share with you, like hungry fish waiting under waves for your first cast.  For sentences you may reel-in and relate to in having possibly lived them yourself.  To retreat into the depths of our minds and relive experiences we hold dear as surfcasters.

To inaugurate this season's recent and strong spring Striper run now fast underway, I offer the two images below that I recently created.  Homage to our queen of the whitewater.  Striped lives do matter.  We will always need them found, alive.  Best wishes in the salt this season & thank-you always for the favor of your reading.

(Any and all comments are welcomed & encouraged)