Ned Desmond

I began fishing as a kid, on ponds and off jetties near my home in Centerville, Massachusetts, a small village on Cape Cod. I caught more than my share of perch, pickerel, sea robbins, eels and blow fish. Once in awhile my father or one of my uncles would take us out on a party boat from Hyannis or Dennisport, and we'd bottom fish for a feast of flounder and tautog. We'd spend hours cleaning them and the backyard would be buzzing with bees, who for some reason always turned up in huge numbers when fishing cleaning was on.  When I was in college, my Uncle Red McDonald , a retired army sergeant, piano tuner and fanatical fisherman, bought a second-hand 18-foot boat and trailer, which unlocked more waters around Cape Cod for him -- and occasionally for me. That's him at the left with a giant tuna he caught off Denmark when he was serving in the military there. I also started to hang around on Nantucket with a high school buddy, Larry Conway , whose dad grew up out there and was crazy about surf fishing, especially late at night, when giant schools of blues coursed just off shore. I loved throwing big surf plugs to those monsters on an inky dark, remote stretch of beach. I didn't fish much after college because I was so busy with work and young children, but about ten years ago I got the bug to go fishing and noted that one of the local charter captains, Walter Ungermann , was still around, and on a lark I gave him a call to see if he was still doing charter for blues out to the Horseshoe shoal and elsewhere in the sound. He took out the entire family, and we all had a blast hauling in stripers and blues as we trolled seams around the shoals in the sound with his custom lures and wire line. We've been out many times since with Walter, who is the consummate expert angler and great storyteller. (If he ever asks you what the greatest work of literature is, I'll save you some grief: just acknowledge it's Moby Dick, and not just because it about the sea and that biggest of sea-going creatures.) Walter helped rekindle my love of fishing, which has gone down many paths since. I learned to flyfish (or as my friends would say, I almost learned to flyfish) in a lot of venues, including the mountains on Kashmir, India, where I fished with gilleys on the Sindh river for browns stocked more than a hundred years ago by the Brits. (I lived in Indian for four years.) And since then I've joined friends for many wonderful trips in Florida, California, Wyoming, Montana, Maryland and Virginia. And I feel like I've just gotten started. I love just about any kind of fishing, and especially love being on foot in the woods, covering a lot of ground and fishing lots of water. And man, is there a lot of water out there.I am also the founder of this site, GoFISHn, which I hope will help anglers get out there more often and introduce lots of new folks to the sport.