I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately. It feels like I always seem to zig when I should’ve zagged. This is not something that’s totally foreign to me because I always try to do things on my own terms. I know where there are fish I could catch, friends give me great reports all the time, but I get a lot less satisfaction out of being lead to a blitz. So instead I rely upon my own past history and sometimes that leaves me fishing among massive schools of fish, which occasionally leaves me grinding it out and, “sucking wind”, as they say.
A lot of times I’ll wake up after a late-night surf striper mission or come home from a pre-dawn albie run in the kayak and my wife will ask me, “how was it?” Lately my response has often been “terrible” and she kind of wrinkles her nose at that notion, and asks gruffly, “Well, wasn’t it at least nice to be out?” Sometimes it’s easy to forget who you’re talking to; when I’m in the fishing mode, I give my answers like I would if I were talking to another angler. Most of fishermen want the basic facts, they don’t want to know about how peaceful it was to watch the sunrise with only the sound of gentle waves lapping against a nearby rocky point, they don’t care that you took photos of some cool clouds or that a bald eagle perched in that huge pine tree near the mansion in the cove.
I’ve been doing this long enough to understand that scuffling is supposed to be part of the process. I’ve also learned that success favors the tenacious. So when I come home and answer the question, “how was it?” with a simple one-word, “terrible,” I’m only describing the singular quest for the fish I was chasing. In my head, all of the peripheral benefits are understood to be a given, because I really do love all those things and I absolutely do feel more relaxed and more centered, after every trip I make, regardless of fishing success.
It’s trusting the process and believing that every trip, every lure change, every cast, could be the thing that changes the trajectory of a dry spell. I never head out expecting to fail, and I never sit back down in the truck asking myself if it’s even worth it to go tonight or tomorrow. It’s a unique mix of positivity and competitiveness that somehow emulsifies into belief. Belief is part stubbornness, part experience and part cult-like allegiance. It’s being blind to the recent past and seeing all those more distant, incredible experiences as an inevitable reward for grinding it out.
The way I keep myself focused and believing is by accepting all of the other things as the life benefits that they truly are. The beautiful things; the sunrises, the shooting stars, the perching eagles, they enrich my life and become stories I will tell long after my last swim in a wetsuit.
Last week I floated up on another kayaker, a med student named Luca who drives from Poughkeepsie New York to Marshfield, Massachusetts EVERY WEEKEND to fish. And then he crisscrosses the entire region looking for albies, stripers or whatever other species he decides to chase. This was a Sunday morning and he had been going hard for two-plus days. Albies and bonito had completely eluded him and we had to battle through some horrendous wind and building seas in our kayaks to get back to the launch. I looked at Luca’s face and I didn’t see a stitch of defeat, I saw that wildness I see in every obsessed angler’s eyes. He’d be driving back to New York in three hours and he was already thinking about what his moves would be the following weekend. In fact, he was certain that the albies would show in a specific spot in Nantucket Sound and I sure hope he was right.
You want to talk about belief? That’s exactly what it looks like.
