The Mast-Head: The Missing Press

A week or two ago, with nothing much in the refrigerator, I decided to go down to the beach in front of the house to catch something for dinner. After the girls had been fed the requisite chicken nuggets, I took a look in my tackle box and had a rude surprise.

Like a lot of other things that go by the wayside for the parents of young children, my fishing supplies were in a sorry state. The hooks on the only popping plugs likely to get a rise out of a September bluefish in the bay were rusty and dull. Other lures were tangled madly in nylon leader or missing barbs that I had intended to replace but never got to. The box was a metaphor for my life.

Not that I am complaining. No, I wiggled a small bucktail free from the hell at the bottom of the box and went down to the beach. I did not catch much, only a small, tapered tan fish that reminded me vaguely of a snake. I had put another one of these, caught in a minnow seine, into our saltwater aquarium, where it hid for a few days in the sand, then took a suicide mission over the glass. I found it on the floor.

If you can imagine a meaner, toothy-looking blenny, then you have a picture of what this fish looked like. Neither my treasured "Fishes of the Gulf of Maine" nor an Internet search produced any suspects, so for now, the species will go unknown by me.

I suppose I am ambivalent about fishing anyway. Just where are all the porgies and blowfish of my youth, I wonder, the ones we used to catch from a dinghy just offshore? Now, even using ground-bunker chum, nothing comes to my line except spider crabs, and there are plenty of those. Maybe I am just lazy, but I get bored after a few casts if nothing is coming up.

There are fish around still, I am told. The bay is filled with porgies, although fluke are apparently in decline, and there were so few winter flounder around that a contest or two has been canceled.

Nature, particularly under the sea, does follow its own, nearly unfathomable patterns. A friend told me of one harbor here that was loaded with fat bunker. He said he even saw a commercial purse seiner chasing them in Gardiner's Bay, something that hadn't been seen around here for more than 30 years. It's hard to say what to make of it all.