UPDATED 2/26/2011

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Fish Tails

by Harry (HB) Koerner

If you’d seen HB tell this story at Capt. Ratty’s in New Bern, you would have thought you were watching theater with the way he way he swayed and leaned, an imaginary fishing pole being worked in his arms, his delivery aimed at his dinner guests, as if you were the other characters in this little drama.  Graciously, HB agreed to write up this tale and has provided photographs of his parents, Eve and Bill Koerner.  If you know HB from Pecan Grove, you’ll recognize his smile in his father to the left.

            My dad was a surf fisherman. He had a series of beach buggies to cover as much territory as he could. He’d let most of the air out of the tires, drive over the sand dunes, and make his way onto and down the beach. He had a series of old cars that he used for this; each one ran until it rusted out. 

            The idea was to “sight” the fish. Dad had a unique gift to see the action. He could spot the signs: a swirl in the water of fish tails gathering momentum to catch their prey, the leap of scattering bait fish as they avoided the snapping jaws of the bass, or the sight of seagulls diving and screaming to feed on remnants of small fish that a school of striped bass had decimated. 

He’d drive up and down the beach looking for these signs, and occasionally, he’d stop to chat with the local fisherman: old friends with whom he had fished over the years. 

On this day, he spotted two friends fishing, and stopped to chat with them. They stood at the edge of the surf dressed in their waders, wools shirts to keep them warm, and billed caps to protect them from the sun and to help spot any action in the surf. Their surf rods, massive bamboo poles with matching reels, were held in place by surf spikes, buried in the sand. Hooks and sinkers smelling of squid, clams, and eel dangled from the rods. 

“Any luck?” Dad inquired. 

“Bill,” one man replied, “we’re giving up fishing after today. We’ve had it.”

“Why? What happened?” Dad asked. 

“Bill, we’ve got over fifty years of experience between us. We know these waters, we know these fish, and we work hard to catch them. We’ve been out since an hour before dawn. We’ve brought the best live bait we could find: blood worms, eel. We’ve got clams, crab, artificial bait. We’ve fished the bottom, we’ve fished the surface. We’ve fished the surf from Barnegat to Surf City and not had a strike, not a hit all the damn day.”

“Anyway, we’re fishing off North Beach late this morning. We look over our shoulders, and there’s a woman . . . pushing a baby carriage over the sand dune, with a fishing rod under her arm. She manages to get it down to the water’s edge.”

“She leans the rod against the baby carriage, then walks down to the water’s edge, digs her hands in the wet sand until she catches a sand crab. She brings the crab back, runs the hook through it, then carries the rod down to the beach, and casts. Good cast, too, Bill. Just over the breaking surf.”

“Then she walks back to the baby carriage, takes in the slack, rocks the carriage with one hand while she holds the rod in the other.”

“By this time we’re laughin’ to ourselves. I mean, this little gal comes out with no gear, with a baby, and is fishing in waters where we’ve not had a bite.”

“All of a sudden, her rod tip slaps down, and she lets go the baby carriage to hold the rod upright. The reel sings as the line is run out against the drag. This is a nice fish! She stands her ground and lets the fish run until he’s tired, then she reels him in. He runs again, and again she holds her ground, then takes in the slack. She plays this fish for what seems like forever, but eventually he comes into the surf. She holds the rod high in one hand, goes into the surf, and grasps the fish under the gill cage.”

“Then she brings the fish back to the baby carriage, removes the hook, and places the fish in the baby carriage with the baby, puts the rod under her arm, and pushes her way back over the sand dune.”

“So, that’s it. No more fishing. Maybe we can learn croquet, or knitting, but no more fishing!”

Dad laughed all the way home. He was still chuckling when he came through the door, and as he did, he smelled dinner, and it smelled good. 

“Hey, Eve. What’s for dinner?”

“Striped Bass” replied Mom. 

Dad was puzzled. He’d had the car, she couldn’t have walked to the fishery; it was too far away. “Where’d you get the fish?” he asked. 

“Out front, on the beach,” she replied.

“But what did you do with Little Billie” he asked.

“Oh, I took him with me, in the baby carriage.”

I was Little Billie.

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