Page 5 – Roccus Writing

Jack is back

back1 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.

Jack at home, where the fish are still biting

sinkfish 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. Continue reading “Jack at home, where the fish are still biting”

Important: about Jack

jack_pickerel_10-08_v 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. Continue reading “Important: about Jack”

Stripers on the move!

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. Continue reading “Stripers on the move!”

Striper slow-down in September?

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. Continue reading “Striper slow-down in September?”

New book in the works

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. Continue reading “New book in the works”

Fishing report: August 3-August 14

This past week has seen some very strange weather, unpredictable to say the least. Lots of sun, lots of clouds, lots of rain, lots of thunder and lightning. High water, low water; cold water and warm. The weather seemed to change hourly and it was very difficult to plan any fishing activities more than a few hours ahead. Come to think of it, most of the past month has been like this, most of the summer, really. But, hey, it’s New England and, like it or not, the weather’s supposed to be like this. Nothing to do but grin and bear it, do what you can, and soldier on.

Sunday, August 3, Dave Skok and Scott Wessels of the Bear’s Den down in Taunton went on an overnight camping trip to Bumpkin Island. We had intended on leaving early in the afternoon but had to sit out a thunderstorm for a few hours before we could launch the canoes and kayaks from Hull and paddle over to the island. Once launched, we fished our way over the mussel beds and the gravel bar but caught nothing despite a favorable tide and low wind. This area, deep inside Hull Harbor, had been very good to me over the years, a fantastic place, really, but over the past two years, the storms had dramatically altered the structure, covered the mussel beds over with mud, and the area wasn’t nearly as inviting as it used to be. There was baitfish aplenty in the area but no fish feeding on them, none that I could see at any rate. Continue reading “Fishing report: August 3-August 14”

Striper fishing getting hotter!

It’s been a hot week, for both man and stripers. Despite rather weak tides(plus one foot and up low tides mostly) the fishing has been quite good in the Boston Harbor area, especially the Inner Harbor along the Winthrop/ Deer Island shore and on the flats near the airport.

I’ve been avoiding mid-day fishing and sticking to late afternoon/early evening hours, cooler and more comfortable and certainly more active, with low tides occuring in the latter part of the day/early evening. Luckily the winds have been lower than in the past few weeks and that has certainly helped. There are a lot of baitfish around right now, mostly pogies, some herring and small mackerel, but I haven’t seen much surface action when I’ve gone looking for it. Despite this I’ve been fishing Gurglers on the surface whenever the water’s surface has been calm and have been having some fantastic fishing, both in terms of numbers and size, although these have varied from place to place and tide to tide. For instance, on Wednesday, fishing from a boat near the airport, all of the fish were in the 32″-34″ range, with one fish I estimated at about 40″ although I never landed it. On Friday, fishing the same area the fish averaged about 23″-25″ with only one bigger one in the mix. On Wednesday the action was slower but the fish bigger; on Friday the action faster but the fish smaller. On Thursday I fished from shore along the inside of Deer Island in the evening and picked up six within about an hour and half, again all on Gurglers, nothing larger than 23″ though but lots of fun. Continue reading “Striper fishing getting hotter!”

Striper fishing picks up!

five stripers

After several really slow weeks, the striper fishing seems to be picking up, especially in theInner Harbor. This is what other anglers have been telling me and it seems to be so from my ownexperience today.

This evening (starting around 6 pm) I went out for a few hours to fish some of the Inner Harbor water that I hadn’t fished much recently. The wind was way down and the surface as calm as could be. Ideal for fishing a Gurglerand that is what I tied on and stayed with until it got dark.

The tide was relatively high (but soon to drop) and I fished fairly close to shore, choosing places where the wading was pleasant and where there was some structure or eel grass close in. My first stop was Donovan Beach in Winthrop, where I picked up four stripers, all between 24″ and 26″. Next stop was around the corner in Belle Isle Creek, where I picked up some more. Then, just to sample a few different places, it was on to Bayswater Road (near Strawberry Fields) in East Boston, where I picked up five more, all about the same size–24″-26″. I quit around dark, when the bugs began to “bug” me. All in all it was great fishing for a few hours. And I can’t help but think that it’s going to get better and better now that the weather seems to be settling down.

Fireworks on the Fourth

fireworks Catching up on my blog-writing tonight. Somehow the time just goes by so quickly!

I spent the Fourth of July weekend rather quietly, catching up on my tying for the most part and workingon Striper Strategies (which I hope to have ready fairly soon) until my fingers and eyes got tired. On the Fourthitself–after finishing several tying orders–I thought I’d reward myself with a little fishing–and exploring.

The ocean was rather roiled up after all the rain we’d been having so I headed up Route 1 in the late afternoon to check out two ponds in Saugus (a nearby town) that I had never fished. In fact, I didn’t even know where they were but Mapquest helped me out there and in about half an hour I reached the first pond, Pranker’s Pond, whichI walked into from the road. Pranker’s is a lovely little pond and according to a man I met there quite a good bass pond; what he didn’t tell me was that it was for Saugus residents only (in fact there was a sign on the path that I hadn’t noticed on the way in). Well, so much for Pranker’s Pond. The other pond was Hawkes Pond, justa few miles away. This too turned out to be a really beautiful but much larger pond, very fishy looking. Only trouble was it was part of a reservoir system; No Fishing/No Trespassing signs were everywhere.

It was now closing in on seven o’clock and I still hadn’t wet a line. What to do? I remembered a pond in the town of Lynnfield, only a few miles away, Pillings Pond. I had never fished this before but I had heard good reports and it seemed as good a bet as any in the little time I had left before dark.

I found my way to the pond and parked at a small parking area on Summer Street and launched my belly boat around 7.30 pm. The air temperature was now about 70 degrees, quite a drop from earlier in the day and there was no wind, the surface as calm as could be. The pond had recently been treated with weed-killer and there were lots of dead and dying weed in close to shore but I managed to kick my way through most of it and get out where the water was clearer and where it would be easier to fish a surface fly. Continue reading “Fireworks on the Fourth”