When I was a kid, we took regular vacations to Cape Cod and we squeezed every drop of enjoyment out of those week-long trips. It was standard issue for someone to burst into tears on the way home because we were being thrust back into the reality of boring real life. I have a distinct memory of being in the back seat of the family car, peering through the flickering irons of the Sagamore Bridge down to the meandering belt of blue that is the Cape Cod Canal and thinking, “I want to live near the ocean when I grow up.” Even as that whispered wish crossed my lips, I didn’t believe it would ever happen. My parents grew up in the town we lived in and my grandparents lived nearly their whole lives in good ‘Westboring’ too. I just thought, that’s what you did.
I always thought that the people who lived on the Cape must live a vacation life, I understood that they worked, but they must just run for the beaches as soon as the clock struck 5, toting coolers and blankets and fishing gear. That’s what I pictured and that’s what I wanted. I also figured that they must love the atmosphere that all the tourists brought to the summer season, these people where there to have fun and that must make life more fun… I figured.
Somehow, I ended up living near the ocean and I know, 100%, that I am happier and have a better overall disposition because of it. The ocean kind of rules my personal circadian rhythm, I think about tides and weather and temperature and moons, constantly. But that that assumption I had about tourists bringing in a party atmosphere, didn’t age quite as well as the rest of it. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not a tourist hater. But the long lines at the gas station, grocery store, ice cream places and coffee shops does get old. And the traffic…it gets old too.
It’s funny that now I go on vacation to places where vacationers don’t typically go. It’s almost as if I’m going back home. Every year, my family rents a big house, my mom, my brothers, their kids, my daughter…we all get together for a week at a lake house somewhere in Maine or upstate New York and I’m just as happy to not be near the ocean for a week. Not having to think about moons and tides, going to the store and seeing a regular flow of people; I even like going in blind with regard to the fishing wherever we end up.
I’m usually relegated to one Plano box filled with a carefully-curated selection of jigs, topwaters and soft plastics and one rod. Sometimes the house we’ve rented has come with a ‘Job Lot’ sit-inside kayak that I’ll struggle to paddle around early mornings or after dark. But it’s very freeing and engaging not already knowing where the fish are likely to be, having to pick apart a shoreline, having to go and catch nothing, to learn how to adapt for the next attempt.
Somehow, over these summer trips, I have managed to land some really nice fish because I’m so stubborn, but also because I’ll do things that most people won’t. On a vacation trip to Maine in 2018, I landed one of the biggest largemouth bass of my life. That fish hit at midnight on a BooYah Poppin’ Frog fished from a tiny purple kayak on a lake that everyone else spent their entire day trolling for lake trout. Another year I landed a 24-inch smallmouth bass on a Whopper Plopper, also in the middle of the night, sitting in a sun-bleached kayak that probably hadn’t been used in years.
There’s something about going out fishing with no expectations, no phone calls about bites firing up or guys trying to guess where some internet hotshot caught the fish they posted yesterday. It’s almost like I can disappear and truly fish, purely for my own enjoyment. If we take vacations relax, to me expectation-less fishing, that’s done – just for me – is the purest definition of that. Fish or no fish.
