Your bones ache, your skin burns, you dream of tea and chocolate and ice-cold beer.
My son is visiting, with all that extraneous vitality that cries out for Tasks. Adventures.
Protein.
So we set a couple of nets despite presentiments of doggies and spiders . My hands were nearly healed from last time.
The weather is Instant Summer.
Jetskis spume in mad paroxysms and ghostly angling craft drift across the bay's mouth on mysterious missions.
The sea and the sky are faintly rippled various blues.
I gave up my wetsuit for a pair of ragged sawn off jeans and a sunhat.
The first net had a polite delegation of spiders & doggies and three nice pollack.
We were out on the peak of a big tide and the other net buoy was lost.
Perhaps the tide, a passing boat, a massive catch. We decided we should go back at low tide.
It was a another place, with towering rocks where we had paddled that morning.
The net was there, part draped over a rock with a fat pollack twisted up in the buoy end.
There was a wrasse, a pollack and two fine mullet in its length.
The mullet were flapping fresh in.
I suspect they come in on the low tide to feed on the deeper pastures of seaweed.
We went into a bay and untwisted and bagged the net.
The other net likewise held two fresh mullet, spidercrabs, and wrasse.
Unless I am fish-starved I let the wrasse go, as janitors of these particular coves.
The pots have been hopeless, though set so close in the buoys knock the rocks.
When we came in, four hours had passed, and I dreamed of a sea of Earl Grey Tea.
There are people who pursue a purpose so deeply on the sea that part of them never really comes back.
Their skin burns black with the sun; their eyes crease into thin lines against the glare. They carry the loneliness of Being with dignity.
There is an increasing tribe of beach-bums, who just about hold down jobs in cities, but live to surf and sailboard.
Young disciples of the Elemental. Their lives are measured in sea days.
They are as stricken as any oceanic Ahab.
The fisherman's day ends slowly, as you have to find useful homes for your catch. Long days seem to take pleasure in getting even longer.
I admit I gave the spiders away.
