Roccus Writing: Jack Gartside's Blog

On a recent trip to Florida, Jack’s erstwhile friend Dale Linder gets outmaneuvered by a tarpon small in size but long on smarts.

This video of Jack was shot a number of years ago during a stopover at LAX. I don’t know much of the story behind it. The pattern looks like some sort of soft hackle streamer. While it turns out that tying while driving is not an offense in Los Angeles county, Jack was ticketed and fined for exceeding the maximum turns of thread allowed under California law.

Another year, another Marlborough fly fishing show. Attendance was off some this year, both on the exhibitor side and on the attendee side. A cratering economy will do that, I guess. But Jack had one of his best shows ever. Sales were brisk. His booth was busy from the time we opened until the time we closed. And while I didn’t get to see it myself, people who came by the booth afterward said Jack’s talk on striper fishing technique went very well (he was concerned beforehand that chemo-fatigue might affect his performance).

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hi, ask questions, reminisce, or just wish him well. I thought I knew most of Jack’s adventures but it was fun to hear a few ones this weekend: a night fishing trip with Terry Boylan to Plum Island that ended with Jack and Terry hiding in the weeds from a boat full of drunks armed with rifles and searchlights who wanted to shoot them after nearly mowing down their inflatable raft; there was also something about a trip on a tramp steamer to South America that nearly ended very badly (got to ask Jack for more details on this one).

As we closed up the booth Saturday evening Jack told me how pleased he was to be able to attend the show after all. The injection of good will he got this weekend is as sustaining for him as anything the doctors do. His support network, he calls you guys. It’s a wonderful thing to see.

Here’s a video Dave Souza shot of Jack showing how to tie a Secret Sand Eel…

Greetings and Salutations,

This is Jack here, back to leading as normal and as full a life as I can while undergoing the treatments that I have to go through that will bring me back to full health and a future filled with more adventures and explorations, ideas and creations, friends and follies. So stay tuned.

As you probably learned from the last newsletter sent out by my webmaster Mike Quigley, I’ve been diagnosed with small cell lung cancer and also what is called superior vena cava syndrome. I was in the VA hospital for several weeks but am now home as an outpatient. So far the treatments have been going very well, better than expected actually. I just finished a second round of chemo last week (two more to go) as well as my first radiation treatments (only 33 more to go). As you can guess these treatments are a little tiring but on the whole not so bad as you might think. I’m in pretty good spirits, experiencing no real difficulties (except for a radical change in my sense of smell and in my taste buds which makes a lot of food taste just awful–but this will pass as the weeks go on). I just try to live each day as best I can and to be thankful for all that is good in my life.

Hundreds of emails, get-well cards, and telephone calls have come in within the past few weeks, from all over the world, from friends and strangers alike, and although I’d love to respond to each one, it’d be a bit difficult right now but I’d like to thank everyone who wrote or called. I appreciate your thoughts and concern much more than you can know, than I can tell. It means the world to me to know that people care; they really do. And I do, too. God bless you all.

After kind of a down week following chemo Jack is back at it–his appetite has returned (which has him quite pleased), his energy is rebounding, side-effects have lessened and he’s feeling pretty good. (The Ginger Hemp Granola he’s been scarfing down may have something to do with this.)

I mentioned in a previous post that Jack wouldn’t be tying for a bit and in the the interim friends would fill his orders from stock. Also that correspondance would be delayed. That time is now past. We’re back to pure Gartside.

Starting on or about December first Jack begins his final round of treatment: a six week outpatient course of chemo and radiation.

Hi folks. Another update on Jack.

After an initial week-long treatment of chemo and radiation Jack has been discharged from the hospital and is back home. Chemo seriously compromises your immune system and in its immediate aftermath the greatest risk is that of an infection, virus, pneumonia, or other transmittable bug hitting you at a time when your system can’t fight it. Turns out that hospitals are actually high risk environments for communicable nasties. All those sick people, I guess.

So Jack is at home. He has responded well to the initial round of treatment. “Miraculous” is the very word his doctors used. His next round of treatment is scheduled for December 1. Until then the plan is he’ll be at home. Right now he’s just resting, glad to be back in familiar surroundings. The treatment has sapped him so he’s snoozing a lot. Generally he’s been free of many of the negative side effects of chemo. He hasn’t grown a set of horns or a tail (or, cuz it’s Jack, I should say he hasn’t grown a second set of horns and a second tail). A few local friends have been helping out with meals and running errands and they’ve been just great. Read the rest of this entry »

A few of you may know (though most probably don’t) that Jack was hospitalized last week. The diagnosis is small-cell lung cancer. Not something you want to have. Right now he’s undergoing an aggressive course of chemotherapy and radiation.

When you hear a friend has cancer the ground drops from under your feet. You picture your friend diminished by disease, a whisper of his or her former self. You feel helpless, kicked in the gut (at least, that’s how I felt).

All I can say is that cancer has never butted heads with the irresistible force that is Jack Gartside before.

He’s in amazing spirits–laughing and joking. His second day in, as doctors entered the room, serious, conferring,  they burst out laughing at the site of Jack and all his visitors all wearing these goofy coke bottle eyeglasses Katie Lavelle had brought over. With an unfamiliar stretch of the Charles River flowing by his hospital window, Jack convinced Dale Linder and Dave Skok to bring their rods and fish it on their next visit so he can know what’s in there. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a rainy, windy, all-around dreary day today here in Winthrop, a poor day for fishing but an ideal one for catching up a bit with my blogging. So here goes.

The past few weeks have been among the best of the year for striper fishing in the Boston/Winthrop/Revere Beach area. In fact, in many ways some might say that it’s been the best in recent memory, at least where large stripers are concerned.

While bopping around Boston Harbor and nearby waters in my friend Mel Harris’ 21′ foot Eastern, I’ve seen enormous schools of very large (12″-14″ almost two-pound) pogies, the water absolutely black with them in places. And under these schools are some amazingly large bass!  I’ve seen (but haven’t caught myself) more large bass in the past week than I can recall seeing in many years, with many in the thirty to forty pound range. There have also been many large bluefish in the inner harbor as well, some up to twenty pounds. Read the rest of this entry »

As many anglers can attest, the striper fishing has been very slow for the past month in the Boston Harbor area and in many other areas as well. While the numbers are way down, the average size of the stripers caught is much larger than I’ve seen in quite some time, with twenty-to-thirty pounders not uncommon, and a few in the forty-to-fifty pound range. Most of these fish, however are being caught by baitfishermen using live pogies or chunk mackerel; flyfishermen are usually getting skunked.

I don’t know why the smaller fish are not around in their usual numbers. There are lots of theories but nothing definitive. Whatever the reason, it’s certainly not for any lack of baitfish. The harbor and nearby shorelines are simply loaded with baitfish, large pogies mostly, with silversides and herring in the mix as well. I went fishing yesterday (Sept. 11) and cruised all around the harbor looking for fish. I found large (12″-14″) pogies by the tens of thousands off Spectacle Island and also around the Deer Island Flats. Sometimes the water was black with them but on only one occasion did I observe anything feeding on them–two, possibly three stripers, and the two I saw were very large, maybe thirty pounds or so. They crashed into the school once, right in the middle of the pack, but never showed again. Most likely there were other stripers lying well beneath the school but I’m not a big fan of deep-fishing for stripers, especially in a wind and choppy water and with a zillion large and tasty  baitfish readily available, so I didn’t bother trying to catch one but turned my attention instead to the pogies themselves, staying with the school just to observe them–fascinating–and even try to catch one on a fly, just for the fun of it. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been blogging more frequently, wonder no more.  I’ve been simply too busy: filling orders, conducting classes, traveling, writing, photographing, fishing, and–though I didn’t know it at the time–doing research for a new book. At the end of each day, despite my best intentions to write up a newsletter or even a blog, I was simply too tired to do anything more than flop into bed and dream about the day to come.

Some of my regular newsletter and blog readers may recall that back in May I began to re-read  my old fishing diaries, some going back to 1958, and to re-visit some of the streams and ponds and lakes that I knew and loved so well when I was young. Well, these nostalgic visitations became a bit of an obsession with me. And a revelation as well.

Fifty years is a long time and in that time many changes naturally occur, some for the worse, some for the better , some hardly noticeable.  And so it was with some of the places I re-visited fifty years or so later.  I found out, for example,that Fish Brook in Topsfield, one of my favorite small streams in 1958, is now only a shadowy trickle of its former self, all silted in and brush-grown and really unfishable over much of its rather short length. Same with Stony Brook in Weston, which I revisited just the other day. I almost couldn’t find it, it was so overgrown with brush in the stretches I used to fish and its water volume seemed to be about half what it was then, just a trickle; the meadow stretch where on June 5, 1959 I caught a beautiful rainbow trout on a Queen of the Waters wet fly now abuts a subdivision. Read the rest of this entry »