News and Events for Nantucket Island
We humans tend to be territorial. People hang out in areas that they like, staying in their comfort zones. Also, we generally stick to routines and, thus, can be fairly predictable. For example, my wife and I have our favorite spot where we sit for church every Sunday. We would be all out of sorts if we had to move to a different location. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? No, but that’s how humans are. And all of these strange traits are directly applicable to us fishing folks, to be sure.
My morning routine goes like this: Step one – make coffee. Step two – check email while drinking coffee. Step three usually involves looking at the world news and being disgusted. Let’s just ignore step three for now, shall we? Much too depressing.
It was looking very much like one of those days. Three plus hours into our beach charter excursion and nary a hookup. Each of us had at least one fish blow up on our respective fishing lures, but somehow all of the attacking fish had dodged our hooks. The only thing biting were the mosquitoes and green head flies. Alas, our time was up and it looked like we had to take the long ride back from Great Point with a skunk tagging along. That is not my favorite thing, let me tell ya…
Blues music is about the realities of life. It expresses the ebb and flow of our human emotions, focusing mostly on the melancholy. When we’re sad, we have the blues. When we want to move away from that sadness, we can chase the blues away with music. Musically, it’s the famous 1-3-5 chord progression and a call and response lyric. But here on Nantucket, we’re often chasing the blues and trying our best to catch them. Never more so than this August, as the inaugural August Blues fishing tournament is ready to hit the Nantucket inshore fishing community.
Be prepared! Ah, yes, the old Boy Scout motto. No better time to be prepared than when you’re out on some remote beach, far from what passes for civilization on this little island of ours. It’s important to remember the 6 P’s: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance! Here’s a couple entries from my fishing log that illustrates the importance of preparedness.
Beach fishing doesn’t have to be a solitary experience. Sure, you’re not going to hang out with a lot of people if you’re out fishing a slack tide at zero dark thirty, but there’s lots of time to meet new people when you’re out in the daylight. And that’s how I met Brian and Tracy Majczak. We were introduced while fishing with friends at Great Point on a Sunday afternoon. They are the kind of people you instantly like. Tracy, a first grade teacher, is a warm, happy person who just brightens the world. Brian is a solid, steady guy who lives to fish. Yeah, these are my kinds of people! And it got even better when Brian and I discovered that we share September birth dates (I arrived 11 years ahead of Brian). How could I not want to hang out with these two?
“If you’re not real smart, you need smart friends.” I think this quote comes from Albert Einstein. Or maybe Yogi Berra. Who knows—maybe I said it. Regardless, there’s a lot of truth to this, right? Expert advice is a really great way to go when you want to get a question answered. And I am fortunate enough to have a bunch of smart friends, particularly when the questions involve fishing for striped bass. So it seemed like exactly the right time to ask them a bass fishing question. The question was as follows…
