School is out this week and my daughter had a half day on Monday so I had to pick her up. She had a pizza party but I was hungry, so I stopped at a small sandwich shop called On The Go in Mattapoisett, MA where she goes to school. I had my surf rod sticking out the back window of my truck, Lila sat quietly in the backseat while I ate my sandwich, a menu selection they call ‘Smokey Joe’ I don’t think it was inspired by the Red Fin color.
As I was sitting there, a car pulled in and the man that got out seemed to stare at me for a second longer than what seemed appropriate, even Lila said, “Dad I think that guy was looking at you!” When he returned he knocked on my window and asked me why I used a swivel to attach my leader instead of a uni-to-uni. I was so taken aback that I didn’t give him the real reason, that it’s easier to tie a Palomar in the middle of the night on a rock in the ocean—but whatever. He then commented on the size and weight of my surf rig and suggested that I must be a ‘trophy hunter’. I told him that I do target big stripers but that I didn’t consider myself a trophy hunter.
We ended up talking about Nauset Inlet where he had caught all of his largest surf stripers and where I caught my first striper that wasn’t a schoolie. That fish was caught on a unique backwater charter where we waded the bars of the inlet while our guide raked sand eels at our feet. As we talked he started telling me about this guy that he taught to fish. He was a Cape guy that lost a fortune in the stock market during the 1980s. This person really latched onto fishing and the fishing lifestyle. Then one day, he was walking on the shoreline of a tidal estuary and saw a wooden rowing dory pushed high of the wrack line. Something about that boat really inspired him and he came back later to sketch it out. He was not a carpenter, but he researched how to build a boat and he built one just like it so that he could fish the backwaters of Nauset Inlet.
That man’s name was Bruce Scott and that boat he made from sketches and inspiration is the same boat I sat in on the fateful day I fell in love with striper fishing. This man, standing at my window, looking at the mayo smeared on my lip, had actually played a part in one of the most significant moments in my whole life. I mean, think about it, that one 34-inch striper, really set off my whole life. The year was 1997, just 10 years later I accepted my first editing job here at The Fisherman Magazine, and that fish was the first domino. If this person, who randomly tapped on my window, had not met Bruce Scott, it’s doubtful that the events that happened afterwards would have occurred at all! It is entirely possible that I may never have found my love for surfcasting. I might still be living in central Massachusetts working at a hardware store or on a construction site. I may never have written a single fishing article, I may not have found my kinship with the sea. I may have spent my life feeling unfulfilled. Of course, it’s also possible that I may have put my obsessive energies into real estate investing or something and I might be a millionaire living on an island somewhere.
Our paths in life are uncertain. But it’s coincidences like these that make you believe that our trajectories are not completely random. That there might be some kind of ethereal magnetism that selects two individuals from their frenetic orbits, out of the billions, to share a five minute blabber, for a reason.
