NIGHT IN RODANTHE
Jerry Kustich
“Ya not gonna catch anything out there today,” drawled the lanky ball-capped waterman loading his flat-bottomed net-filled skiff onto a trailer in the knee deep shallow takeout of Pamlico Sound near Rodanthe, North Carolina. “All I caught in my long net set is a few mullet.”
After inquiring “What was going on out there?” while preparing my kayak for a morning of chasing spotted seatrout, the commercial fisherman informed me that the fresh water from too much rain had pretty much kept the “speckles” from seeking the inshore shallows. He continued, though, that they have been catching a few here and there in the hard to reach bays and creek inlets. Concerned that maybe these fish were disappearing like so many other species along the coast this past decade, I asked him how the fish populations were doing.
“We still get some big uns in the deeper holes spread throughout the Sound, but we’ll never catch ‘em all since they live so shallow,” rubbing his whiskers in a moment of distain, “but the government fish guys have cut back our commercial allotment anyway.” After wishing him good luck he told me to “watch out for bull sharks” with a kind of hidden grin under his bushy lip hair as I paddled toward deeper water. Later, in light of the aforementioned info, I felt very fortunate to have found a few “speckles” in a far off channel on the incoming tide.
So when Sharon and I were eating dinner and sipping margaritas at a local Bar & Grill that same evening, a wiry, wild looking character with long hair, straggly beard and one-toothed sly smile grabbed a seat at our table and introduced himself. His name was Willy, and though slight of frame, he was definitely hard around the edges. Within a few minutes we learned that Willy lived in Rodanthe for his entire fifty-three years, his ex-wife was a witch, he spent three years in jail, and the cops had just rousted him at three o’clock the previous morning. Oh yea, and we also learned that Willy was the best damn commercial fisherman on the Outer Banks. To hear him tell it, he was not well liked by other local fisherman because he worked his ass off and caught more fish than anyone out there. Grabbing another beer he continued his story saying he set eighteen hundred hooks per trip making five hundred to a thousand dollars every turn around. He was almost on National Geographic’s TV series “Wicked Tuna” but his lawyers advised against it. He caught more five hundred pound-plus tuna then those guys ever dreamed about. And on and on Willy rambled. When he excused himself to get a smoke, I thought he was gone for the night.
But after a bit, Willy came back and apologized for taking so long. He got into an argument, he said, and four guys wanted to beat him up in the parking lot, but he gave them the slip. When he ordered us a few more drinks I took the opportunity to ask him what he thought about the state of the fish populations in the Sound. Willy blurted, “I still get ‘em, but the fishery guys are always on my case for catching too many. Caught a nine-pound speckled last week. You just have to know where to look.” Again another evasive answer didn’t inspire confidence. About that time Willy wanted to take the Karaoke stage and sing us a song. After struggling through two verses of an unrecognizable Lynyrd Skynyrd tune, he staggered back to the table. At that point it seemed like a good opportunity for Sharon and I to take our leave before getting too deep into Willy’s world. We shook hands and he wished us safe travels. He then said it was time to kick ass out in the parking lot anyway, so off went Willy.
And as we were heading back to our rental cottage, for some reason I felt guilty ordering fish and chips for dinner.
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