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
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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 may 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.