New York Times columnist John Tierney is as taken with all this as I am, and he ran a little experiment a couple years ago in which he asked readers to list their ten most expensive purchases, and the ten purchases that gave them the most happiness. The point was to find the overlap.

And he found it. Houses, college, travel, home electronics, and some kinds of cars (a wide range, from Jaguar to Honda Civic) delivered in the happiness department. But lots of other purchases didn’t. Take out things we have to spend money on, like insurance and taxes, and the big expenses that didn’t make people happy were children, wedding ceremonies, and all the cars that weren’t on the other list.

And boats. If it’s happiness you’re after, says Tierney, “Never buy a boat.”

I knew that when we decided, over the winter, to buy a boat. Specifically, we bought a 23-foot Steigercraft, tricked out with all the electronics a fisherman could want, and an F250 diesel truck to pull it. For us, it definitely qualified as a major purchase. The only thing we’ve ever bought that was more expensive is the house we live in, and that was a purchase of a different order. Real estate often holds its value. Sometimes, it even appreciates. The value of boats and trucks, though, just dwindles down to nothing.

To add insult to injury, you have to keep putting money in as the value dwindles. For starters, there’s gas. An awful lot of gas. Then there’s registration and taxes, every year, on the boat, the truck, and the trailer. There’s maintenance. Repair. Eco-friendly chemicals to get the caterpillar-shit stains off the gunwales. It never ends.

A boat, in short, is expensive.

Our previous boat, a 19-foot Eastern, cost a lot less. (And it isn’t ‘previous’ quite yet – it’s for sale at Millway Marina, and priced to move.) We could tow it with a smaller truck, it took a lot less gas, and had many fewer things that could go wrong. And we got a lot of excellent fishing done in it. The decision to step up to a bigger boat was non-trivial, and we made it because we have found, in the four years that we’ve been here, that we love to fish.

It’s not just the fishing. If you come here often, you’ve heard me say it before and I hope you’ll forgive me for saying it again: some of our very best days have been just the two of us, on the boat together. There was one day, one summer, at Horseshoe Shoal that was for me almost emblematic of happiness. Bright sun, calm sea, biting bluefish, and Kevin and me.

We want more days like that, and so we bought a bigger boat.

But you never know how things like this will turn out. The bigger boat could just be a bigger headache. It could be a hassle to trailer, and to launch. Its bigger size and deeper draft could limit us. More electronics means more things to go wrong. You never know.

So I am happy to report that the boat bought us a day like yesterday.

We woke up to fog and a little bit of spitting drizzle. There was a wind out of the south-east, not too bad, but enough to blow up two-foot seas in Nantucket Sound. We hadn’t planned to fish, but the boat was all set up in the driveway because we’d gone the day before. (And the day before that, and the day before that – Kevin’s brother Marty had been visiting, and it was all fishing, all the time.)

We were still drinking our first cup of coffee when I ventured to suggest we could go out to try for bluefish. We had caught some the day before, trolling with top lures, but we sent Marty home with them because every single one had been hooked by his rod. (It’s always that way with Marty, and I don’t understand it.)

Kevin was game. All we had to do was load the cooler and ice onto the boat, dress for rain, and go.

This was not a day we would have taken the Eastern out because we would have been neither safe nor comfortable. Dreamcatcher (we’re keeping the name), though, could take a day like that and much, much more. She’s got proper navigation lights, as well as both radar and GPS. We can see other boats and make sure they see us. Although we wouldn’t voluntarily go out in pea soup, a day with half-mile visibility isn’t a problem.

Electronics on a foggy day

Out in the Sound, about a mile offshore, we had the place to ourselves. I am a water sissy, and that used to make me nervous, but I feel much better in a boat that has the aforementioned radar and GPS as well as two batteries, a relatively new motor, and all recommended safety equipment. We have a marine radio that can send an automated distress signal with our location at the touch of a button, and we have a back-up, hand-held radio in case we lose all power. We have paper charts. We have a compass. We have two waterproof cell phones, and an up-to-date SeaTow membership. In weather that’s even a little dirty, we wear inflatable PFDs.

We were safe, and we were comfortable. The enclosed pilot house meant that the only time we weren’t sheltered was when we were setting up or taking in rods, or dealing with a fish. We went on the same troll we’d done the day before, trailing three lines with poppers, lures that bounce on the surface of the water. And we used our autopilot!

Yes, we have autopilot, and it is my candidate for the coolest thing ever. You can set a destination, or a route, or simply a heading. Press a button, and the boat takes over the steering while you control the speed.

There are a couple reasons that this is the coolest thing ever. For starters, the boat is much better at holding a course than you are. Driving a boat isn’t like driving a car; it’s very difficult to maintain a straight line. The better you are at it, the more efficient your boat is. You can burn a lot of extra gas zigging and zagging and correcting and over-correcting. I can’t hold a line to save my life, but the autopilot has mad skills and keeps us virtually dead on. If you set a destination it even accounts for drift!

Being able to set the autopilot for trolling means, first, that your lines are less likely to tangle because the boat holds its course. It also means that there is an extra set of hands, the hands that would have been on the wheel, available to help with the fishing. The danger of autopilot is that you can be lulled into not paying attention to where you’re going, and we make sure to keep a lookout at all times. We also make sure the radar is on, and set to sound an alarm if another boat gets close.

We were safe, we were comfortable, and we caught three nice bluefish. Not an epic fishing day, certainly, but exactly the kind of morning we wanted this boat for. Just Kevin and me, trolling for bluefish. Our lives are a little overcrowded, and being on the boat together, thinking about nothing but fish, ratchets us down a bit. As we came in, we saw a boat named “Off Switch,” and I thought it was apt.

The time may come when I curse the day we bought the boat. There are many boat-related scenarios involving time, money, and danger that could be enough to make me swear off boat-ownership forever. But for now, the boat – and what it lets us do – makes me happy.

Not only does it give us days like yesterday, it also lets us take people with us. We have friends who either don’t have a boat, or keep their boat in the water and don’t have the flexibility to fish both sides of the Cape, and we very much enjoy bringing them out to where the fish are. The boat also gives us fish. So far, a lot of fish – to date, we’ve landed about 60 pounds of striped bass filets (a bounty we’ve been able to share with friends), eight pounds of bluefish (drying in preparation for smoking, as we speak), and a pound of mackerel (which I pickled in an experiment I’m close to declaring a success). If we were keeping score, that would be about a thousand dollars’ worth, retail value, all caught in three weeks.

We’re not keeping score, because there’s no way we’ll ever come out ahead. What we spend on the boat and the upkeep would keep us in fish for the rest of our lives, and the fish don’t justify the boat. The happiness justifies the boat. The time out of mind justifies the boat.

Days like yesterday justify the boat.

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Uncertainty is the mother of superstition, and getting food first-hand – farming or fishing, hunting or gathering – is maddeningly uncertain. Hunters, in the absence of a sure-fire way to find deer, swear by lucky hats or rabbit sightings. In the quest for consistent harvests, biodynamic gardeners harness cosmic-astral influences by burying chamomile-stuffed cow intestines.

And fishermen, fishermen are the worst. It starts with a world-wide prohibition against bananas on boats, and goes downhill from there.

I’m a fisherman, but I’m also a hard-assed empiricist. I’m not superstitious, but I see how it happens.

This past weekend, Kevin and I went out for bluefish. Our favorite bluefish spot is Horseshoe Shoal, 25 square miles of shallows in the middle of Nantucket Sound. We’ve been there many times, and there’s one particular spot on those 25 square miles that’s been very good to us.

We went there, like we always do. We put in the same lures we always use. We trolled in the same direction, at the same speed, that we always troll. We got nothing.

The shoal is crisscrossed by rips, abrupt changes in the flow of the water as it is forced up by a ridge or reef on the sea bed. Fish tend to congregate around rips, and trolling along a line where the surface changes from rough to smooth is a reasonable way to tackle a stretch of water.

That’s what we did. We went along the rips. We weaved around the rips. We crossed the rips on the perpendicular. We got nothing.

We saw no birds. We saw no fish, either in the water or on the fish finder. It was a calm, sunny, fishless day.

And then, without warning, Kevin took off his pants. I turned around and there he was, at the helm, in his underpants. It wasn’t risqué; the underpants were modest and substantial, no more revealing than 70’s-era gym shorts.

I was mystified. “Why did you take off your pants?”

Before he could answer, his rod bent 90 degrees and we heard the whizzzzzz of line running out against drag. Kevin put the boat in neutral, got the rod out of the holder, and fought the fish up to the boat. It was a beautiful, fat, seven-pound bluefish.

“I took them off because it was hot,” he told me after we’d gotten the fish on ice.

The key to catching fish is being where they are. Once we find them, we stay there, going over the same spot, in the same way, over and over. Kevin got a bite on each of the next three passes, and landed two more fish. I got nothing.

We were using the same lure, trolling on the same rip, from the same boat. The only difference was that I was wearing pants. It was maddening. But I am not superstitious and I was not going to fish in my underwear.

Finally, I was vindicated. A fish! As I was reeling it in, though, I realized it wasn’t a bluefish. It wasn’t fighting and twitching and taking line. It was just swimming in, docile. I saw it flash in the water. A striped bass, too small to keep.

Kevin shook his head ruefully and gestured to my pants.

Animals, up to and including humans, are wired for causality. When caged pigeons are fed pellets at random intervals, they start contorting themselves in strange ways, trying to replicate whatever it was that made the food come down the chute. We humans do rain dances and sacrifice animals and wear lucky hats.

I know the fish probably started to bite because the tide shifted and the water started moving faster. That Kevin got bites and I didn’t was either the luck of the draw or the motion of my rod, which is more flexible than his. I know all that, I do, and I’m a hard-assed empiricist to boot. And still I was tempted to take my pants off.

Even though I didn’t, I finally caught a fish, and then another. We had seven fish in the cooler when the water calmed and the bite died.

As we headed in, we passed a boat that had been trolling near us. They, too, were packing up to head in. They’d been within a couple hundred yards, but we hadn’t seen them hook up once.

As we got close, we could see why. In a tragic misunderstanding of fishing principles, they had taken off their shirts.

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Yesterday we caught nothing, but it was a sunny day. The company – my husband – was certainly congenial. But not being home cleaning or raking was inadequate compensation for the particular way in which we caught nothing.

We started with high hopes, because two guys were catching bluefish right off the dock at Prince Cove, where we put the boat in. We thought about staying right there, but we decided to head out to Cotuit instead.

There were two reasons for this. First, we hoped to get bigger fish. Second, the kind of fishing going on in Prince Cove is not my favorite kind.

The bluefish were in the cove because they followed the schools of bunker. Bunker, which Cape Codders call pogies but are technically menhaden, are small, filter-feeding fish that move in massive schools up and down the Atlantic coast. They have the bad luck to be at the bottom of the food chain, and schools of bunker often have schools of predator fish underneath.

When the bunker come into Prince Cove, you can look into the water and see masses of them swim by. Periodically, they surface en masse, and it’s a good bet that a hungry bluefish pushed them up out of the water.

To catch a bluefish, you liveline a bunker. But first, you have to catch a bunker.

Bunker eat phytoplankton and zooplankton, neither of which can be put on a hook and dangled in the water. If you try and use a regular net, the fish just scatter. You can use a cast net, but if you don’t have one (we don’t), you catch them by using a treble hook with a weight and casting it over the school. Then you yank it, hard, through the fish. If you do it right, you snag a fish with the hook. It’s pretty barbaric.

The barbarism continues as you take the bunker off that hook, put it on another hook, and cast it out to lure a bluefish. I was happier thinking we could go out to Cotuit and use good old-fashioned metal lures.

Unfortunately, when we got out to Nantucket Sound, there were no fish in evidence. The water was quite choppy, and we trolled our favorite sandbank for a while, to no avail. It was windy enough that the idea of fishing inshore appealed, and we headed back into the bay.

We tried a couple of spots on the way in, but it wasn’t long before we were back where we started, in Prince Cove. We were encouraged when we got there because Bob was there.

Us, watching Bob

If you follow our fishing adventures, you know Bob. He’s been fishing these waters for decades, with a will, and has the expertise to show for it. Much of what we’ve learned about catching fish, we’ve learned from him.

Bob has a little Carolina Skiff, and he was tied up to one of the moorings in the Cove. As we watched, he reeled in a schoolie striper. We tied up a couple moorings away from him and rigged the snagging hooks.

We could see the bunker swimming around the boat, and we watched bunches of them surface all around the cove as the fish underneath snacked.

We each cast a weighted treble hook over the bunker and reeled in, giving hard yanks.

Nothing.

We tried again.

It was a physics-defying failure. The fish were so dense in the water, they seemed impossible to miss. Yet we missed them, over and over.

Meanwhile, Bob snagged a bunker on every cast.

We were twenty yards away. We were casting into the same school of fish. We were using the same equipment. Yet he was catching fish and we were catching none.

I watched how he was doing it, and tried to do it exactly the same way. Cast. Wait a beat for the hook to sink. Tighten the line. Yank. Tighten again. Yank again.

Result: Bob, fish. Tamar, no fish.

I was ready to ask him for a cigarette, because smoking seemed to be the only thing he was doing that I wasn’t.

Kevin, meanwhile, was doing a little better. He did snag a couple of bunker, and we did manage to do a little actual fishing. The result was that the bluefish, which were small, bit pieces off the back of the bunker. Each time we reeled them in, they were smaller.

We kept trying. Hell, just look, Bob’s catching fish with dead bunker!

We caught no fish.

I have caught no fish often enough that I can generally do it with good grace. This time, though, I’m sorry to have to report that I was graceless and surly.  &*#^$& FISH.  &*#^$& BOAT.  &*#^$& BOB.

There’s a special kind of frustration that comes from trying to do something physical, something that looks simple, and failing. It’s how golf clubs end up in trees. Luckily, it’s a fleeting frustration. As soon as you stop trying, it goes away.

So, today, I’m ready to try again. I have this idea that snappers, the little bluefish terrorizing the bunker in Prince Cove, could be pickled like herring, and I want to try it. Instead of snagging bunker, I’m going to try a Sabiki rig, the multi-hooked contraption we use to catch mackerel.

Bob said it worked for him every time.

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While going through life behaving well isn’t so hard – most moral choices are straightforward – it’s very difficult to reduce “behaving well” to first principles. In general, I’d say I’m a greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number kind of girl, but I fully acknowledge the difficulty of such a far-reaching and enigmatic calculation.

Immanuel Kant, borrowed from britannica.com

Immanuel Kant thought he had the first principle nailed. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” was so compelling to him that he called it the Categorical Imperative. (Not just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill imperative, mind you.) While it’s hard to find fault with something that boils down, essentially, to “do unto others … ,” I’m not sure it helps with the really tricky moral dilemmas. Those usually involve overcrowded lifeboats, tragic accidents, or concentration camps. Thinking of your actions as a universal law doesn’t help you decide whether you should have drowned the child Adolph Hitler, if you’d had the chance.

I have gone through nearly fifty years of life on this planet without ever having encountered what I’d consider a tricky moral dilemma, so the lack of a compelling philosophy has had very little practical significance. Most of what we all consider moral behavior is uncomplicated. You don’t need a coherent first principle to figure out that, when the cashier gives you too much change, you give it back.

Life is governed, instead, by a series of smaller, less important rules. One of my favorites, borrowed from my friend Rafe, is “Never refuse a mint.” Miss Piggy contributes “Never eat anything you can’t lift.” The only billionaire of my acquaintance adds “Always do a billionaire a favor.”

Here’s my contribution to the pantheon: “Always make friends with the local brewer.”

Bluefish, drying

I will confess that I did not think of this rule in a flash of foresight. It was only after Kevin and I had met our local brewer, Todd Marcus, and decided he and his wife Beth were interesting, funny, and smart that we began to see the real advantages of that friendship. Like, when we invited them over for pizza and they brought a cooler full of their products. Or when our out-of-town friends come to visit and we get to take them backstage at the Cape Cod Beer brewery.

Being friends with a brewer is particularly important during bluefish season which, for us, began this past Saturday.

The weather was good, and it was my stepson Eamon’s last weekend with us. We rigged the rods with wire leaders and metal lures, filled the boat with gas and the cooler with ice, and headed out to Horseshoe Shoal, about six miles due south of Osterville.

There was some chop in Nantucket Sound, and it took us a while to get out. Once we got there, it was better. The Shoal is a big shallow area in the middle of the Sound and, when the wind is from the south, the north end stays relatively calm. We went to our favorite spot, dropped the lines in, and I had the first fish in the boat inside ten minutes.

Bluefish, smoking

We spent the whole morning, and came home with thirteen fish. I fileted them all and we grilled three that night, Nantucket-style. The rest went into a brine, overnight.

On Sunday, Kevin fired up the brand-new smokehouse for his first attempt at fish smoking. Last year, he perfected a kettle-grill method, but the smokehouse lets him do a much bigger batch. There are still a few kinks to be worked out (at which point I’ll tell you in more detail about the smokehouse), but we ended up with twenty filets of smoked bluefish. A little softer and moister than is ideal, but with a balanced, smoky flavor.

When I posted our haul on Facebook, Beth posted back: “You wanna trade for beer?”

Always make friends with the local brewer.

Kevin, checking

Oh, and the local gardeners. Bluefish season corresponds, coincidentally, with garden bounty season, and Dianne and Doug gave me a very nice bunch of raspberries and blackberries. Past bluefish hauls have earned us produce of all stripes, from Doug and Dianne, from Al and Christl, from Amanda. From our friends who don’t garden or brew, there is goodwill and gratitude.

We value goodwill and gratitude a lot, if not quite as much as beer.

The problem with my rule is that it does not pass the Categorical Imperative test. If “make friends with the brewer” were a universal law, and everyone did it, there would be no beer left for us.

Such are the limits of moral philosophy.

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Kevin and Bob, willing fish to be in the vicinity

No matter how you slice it, the main point of fishing is to catch fish. It’s all well and good to be out on a boat, with family and friends, on a beautiful day, engaging in a wholesome activity, communing with nature, and all that. But the god’s honest truth is that, without fish, fishing can suck.

It doesn’t invariably suck. All those other nice touchy-feely things offer a kind of tepid consolation, and if it really is a beautiful day, and you really are out with family and friends, coming home with an empty cooler isn’t as bad as when it’s cold and rainy and there’s a jerk on the boat.

Today was a beautiful day. I was out with family (Kevin) and friend (Bob, whose wife Mad Dog unfortunately couldn’t join us). We went tubing.

If, like me, you lack fishing experience, you think ‘tubing’ is when you hang on to an inner tube attached by a rope to the boat, and go really fast. If, unlike me, you know something about fishing, I don’t need to tell you that ‘tubing’ is when you use a long rubber – yes – tube on the end of your line to simulate an eel. You then troll very slowly in an effort to catch striped bass.

I found out about tubing in a rather mortifying incident at our local bait and tackle store, Sports Port. We went in to buy some bait or tackle, I forget which, and The Kid was behind the counter. Those of you who follow this space may remember The Kid as being the guy who wouldn’t tell us his super-secret northside striper spot even after we’d told him our super-secret southside striper spot just the day before.

So, this time, we didn’t even bother asking The Kid where the stripers might be biting and instead, in an effort to be cagy, told him we’d been trying for them in the channel outside Barnstable Harbor, but hadn’t had any luck.

He nodded sympathetically (he’s actually a nice Kid, and we like him). “Were you tubing?” he asked.

I looked at him quizzically because this seemed like one hell of a non sequitur. “No,” I said, with something of the tone you’d employ to explain something simple to a child. “Our boat doesn’t go fast enough.”

What you go tubing with

So, when Bob, a vastly experienced striper fisherman, met us at the Blish Point ramp this morning, and told us he thought it would be a good day to try tubing, I nodded knowledgeably. “Good idea, Bob.”

I was relieved not just to avoid making an ass of myself, but also to find out that we wouldn’t be jigging, which requires you to yank on the fishing pole over and over for hours on end.

We went out through Barnstable Harbor to the north side of Sandy Neck, and put in our tubes. We trolled very slowly, watching for the telltale bending of a pole that meant we had a striper on the line. Over the course of the next seven – count ‘em, seven – hours, it happened exactly once, and we lost the fish immediately.

But the day was not without incident. We hooked three bluefish, and landed two of them. A bluefish bite has a completely different look and feel from a striper bite, so we were under no illusion that we were reeling in what we’d come out for, but catching a bluefish is way better than catching nothing at all.

At one point, headed toward home, it became clear that there was something on one of the lines. It was also clear that it wasn’t a fish – might be seaweed, might be a crab. Bob reeled it in, and discovered that the lure, which had been bouncing off the bottom, had snagged some rogue gear someone had lost. We disentangled our line from the rogue line and started bringing up the gear we’d caught.

It was a wire line, and there was a lot of it. Bob just kept hauling. When he had a huge, snarled ball of stainless steel wire, and was still pulling, he told us he thought there was something on the end of it.

Bob's prize catch: the bunker spoon

He pulled some more, and we saw it coming up from the deep, a white lure with a very convincing fish-like motion. “It’s a bunker spoon!” He said. “I’ve got a friend who loves these things, but they’re thirty dollars a pop.”

A bunker spoon, as it turns out, is a foot-long piece of metal (this one was painted white) with a curve in it and a hook you could hang your coat on. It’s supposed to look like a really big menhaden (which are called bunker or pogies in these parts), a prime bait fish, and attract the really big stripers that eat really big menhaden.

If you can’t catch a fish, the next best thing is to catch a lure that will help you catch a fish the next time.

But the excitement wasn’t over. As we were trolling east toward the tip of Sandy Neck, Bob spotted a black fin sticking out of the water. Now, anyone who’s seen Jaws knows what to do when you see a fin sticking out of the water, but we opted against panicking.

It wasn’t a shark. It was an ocean sunfish, a giant (it can reach 3000 pounds), peaceable, warmth-loving fish. Its scientific name is Mola mola, but it’s called a sunfish because it likes to loll on the water’s surface, catching rays. Confusingly, in every other language, it’s called something that translates roughly to moonfish because those non-English speakers choose to focus on the fish’s shape, which is round and full, rather than on its habits.

Whatever you call it, we’d seen them once or twice before in these waters. This time, though, I happened to have a camera.

We all wanted to get a better look, and I wanted to get a picture, so Bob pulled the boat up close to the sunfish.

And now – here, today – I’m going on record as officially believing in the Loch Ness Monster. I was skeptical of the idea of a giant brontosaurus living in a Scottish lake, but it wasn’t mere skepticism that made me a bona fide non-believer. Up until today, I found the lack of photographic evidence to be the absolutely convincing factor.

But I’m here to tell you, you can’t photograph a sea monster. I don’t care if you’re Jacques Cousteau. If something big swims up next to your boat, you are not getting a picture of it. The boat’s moving, the monster’s moving, the auto-focus is looking at the water’s surface, the glare on the screen is rendering your image invisible.

A 1000-pound ocean sunfish. Photo by Jacques Cousteau.

Because my photographic evidence isn’t exactly convincing, I don’t expect you to believe me, but we saw not one, not two, but three ocean sunfish. It was apparently a nice afternoon for sunbathing. We also saw the splash of something very, very large (“It looked like someone dropped a Volkswagen in the water,” Bob said), but we did not see the large thing itself.

So, there was no striper, but there was more than tepid consolation. We had bluefish, we had an expensive lure dragged up from the depths, we had a posse of sea monsters. We had a beautiful day, and no jerks.

It didn’t suck at all.

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The mark of authenticity is the mess

When I go get my own lobster, though, the mess is epic. We went out yesterday, in a two-foot chop, to pull our pots. The ropes are covered with sea crud, which has to be removed to get a hold on the rope, and most of it lands on the deck. The pots themselves are also grimy and weedy, and when you brace them against your body to hold them steady on the gunwale in a heaving sea, the grime and weeds get all over you. (You’re wearing coveralls, if you’ve thought to bring them.)

Then you have to rebait the bags. First, you dump the bones of the old bait overboard, but a few inevitably find their way onboard. Then you fill the bags with the frozen pieces of bluefish rack from the smelly cooler full of bait. The bait leaves blood and guts on anything it touches, which always includes your gloves and sometimes, your deck and your clothes.

By the time you’ve checked all ten pots, the boat’s a disaster. The deck is cruddy and slippery, your gloves and clothes are stained and wet.

That’s what Kevin and I looked like yesterday when we brought our boat in on the Blish Point ramp, where four tourists from Cincinnati were wandering around the parking lot.

They were clearly lost, and we asked them if we could help them find something. This led to a whole discussion of what to do on Cape Cod and, for what may have been the first time since we moved here two years ago, I felt like a local.

It wasn’t because I knew where to go to eat, or which activities were not to be missed. It was because I was standing on the ramp, next to my grimy working boat with five lobsters in the hold, wearing my stained coveralls.

Kevin caught the pool fish, almost ten pounds

But I also had authenticity momentum. We’d gone out fishing the day before, to Horseshoe Shoal, in Nantucket Sound. At first, it was a slow day (we even considered renewing our membership in the Sea-Level Club, but it was a little chilly). Then, round about mid-day, we found the fish – the old-fashioned way, without our GPS/fish-finder, which we’d forgotten. A little local knowledge, a little luck, and we brought home fifty pounds of bluefish.

Bluefish mess is a little different from lobster mess. There’s less seaweedy crud, but blood and guts, as well as the bluefish’s last meal, get all over everything.

The mess, though, neither starts nor ends on the boat. Before, there’s the mess of bait – bluefish racks and scraps for lobster, and squid, shiners, or eels for fish. The single most disgusting thing we’ve had to deal with here was the freezer that stopped freezing when it was full of bait. The flies were fighting each other just to get close.

After, there’s the mess of garbage. Yesterday we smoked our bluefish and boiled our lobster. Although most of the shells and scraps end up in the compost or the shell pile, enough end up in the garbage that you’ve got about a twelve-hour window to get to the dump.

Everything we do makes a mess. Besides the bloody boat and the cruddy clothes, there’s chicken poop on the walkway, washing machine parts all over the garage, dirt under our fingernails. So we hose down the boat, do the laundry, sweep the walkway. The garbage and spare parts go to the dump, and we get in the shower. And then we start all over again.

So, if you’re ever at my house, and you wonder, as you approach the front door, what that smell is, I can tell you right now. That’s the smell of authenticity.

I was high hook, with five fish, but my biggest was only 8 pounds

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But I’ve always wondered about that. When you filet a bluefish that hasn’t been bled, there’s not much blood unless you pierce the body cavity (not – ahem – that I’ve ever done that). I would have thought that, if there were an appreciable amount of blood in the muscle tissue, you’d know. I mean, bluefish flesh is kind of gray-blue and blood is bright red. It would stand out.

To bleed, or not to bleed?

Bleeding a bluefish is, to my mind, a nasty business. Different people have different methods, but most people do some variation of holding the fish by the tail and slicing through the gills. The fish has to be alive so the heart pumps the blood out of it.

There is disagreement about the degree to which fish feel pain. Some people – catch-and-release fishermen, for example – contend that fish feel nothing. Others believe that a fish doesn’t like getting pulled out of the water by a hook through its mouth any more than you would. Most people occupy the vast middle ground.

I lack the ichthyological expertise to have an opinion on fish pain, but anyone who’s ever hooked a fish can tell you that they certainly don’t seem to enjoy it. All I know is that I want the fish I catch to suffer as little as possible.

This desire led to an embarrassing incident at Bass Pro Shops a while back.

It wasn’t really my fault. It was Jen’s. Jen, who lives in England and blogs at Milkweed & Teasel, wrote about killing fish with what the British call a ‘fish priest.’ It’s a weighted stick with a spring, and you use it to dispatch your fish quickly with a really good conk to the head.

“Hey!” I thought. “I need one of those!”

We made the trip to Bass Pro Shops for a few things that we can’t get out here on Cape Cod, and I ventured into the fishing section while Kevin was getting parts for the boat trailer. I browsed the aisles, but I didn’t see what I was looking for. So I went to the information counter and described it.

“We have clubs for that,” the guy told me. But I didn’t want a club. I already have an ax handle. I wanted the weighted stick with the spring action, I told him.

That’s when another guy, who had heard the conversation, came over. “I used to be a cop,” he told me. “What you’re describing is a blackjack, and it’s illegal.”

Illegal! How could something you use to put fish out of their misery be illegal? In theory, you could use it on other things besides fish, I suppose. But still.

“So, I guess you don’t carry it here,” I said.

He nodded unsympathetically and started to walk away.

I had really had my heart set on it, and I was disappointed. But then I started thinking – if I asked Jen really nicely, maybe she’d send one over from the UK.

“Excuse me,” I called out to the ex-cop, who turned around.

“I understand that it’s illegal to buy one, but is it illegal to own one?”

He nodded at me even more unsympathetically, and looked like he was this close to calling security. “They’re illegal to sell, illegal to buy, illegal to own.”

Well, okay then. I guess I’ll have to stick with my ax handle.

The ax handle lives on the boat, and our standard operating procedure when we bring a fish on board is to whack it on the head to kill it immediately. This is not my favorite part of fishing, but I figure it minimizes whatever suffering the fish is enduring. Although a fish that has its gills cut bleeds out very quickly, I’ve gotta believe that’s more unpleasant than getting knocked on the head with a blow you don’t see coming.

On the other hand, I Iike to eat bluefish. Does it really make a difference? I needed to know.

Sounds like a job for the Hard-Assed Empiricist!

There’s only one way to find out whether bleeding a bluefish affects the flavor of the meat. You have to catch two bluefish, of roughly the same size, and bleed one of them but not the other. You filet them and cook them, plain, in exactly the same way. Then you taste them, blind. That means you have to close your eyes while your husband gives you a bite of each.

None of the fishing experts, legitimate or self-styled, professional or amateur, seem to have done this. They all apparently take it on faith that you have to bleed a bluefish because all the fishing experts who came before told them that you have to.

Hard-Assed Empiricist that I am, I did the test.

We went out to Horseshoe Shoal and caught us some bluefish. We bled one, and not the others. I fileted them all, and we matched one of the bled filets to an unbled filet of the same size. (The rest of the bluefish went into a tandoori marinade.) Kevin grilled the two filets, and I tasted them blind. So did Kevin, and my stepson Eamon, and my parents.

The results?

Drumroll, please …

Nobody could tell the difference. They tasted exactly the same. You heard it here first.

I’m not prepared to state unequivocally that bleeding never matters. Our bluefish were small, about three pounds each, and it may be that bleeding is important in larger fish. We’ll test that theory when we get our hooks into some of those larger fish. It may be that it matters if the fish sits around for a couple of days before it’s cooked.

Or, it may be that it just doesn’t matter.

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I was feeling all salty and heroic, bestowing little bags of beautiful peppered fillets on a few of our favorite people. Hah! The tables were turned. Here’s a list of what I was given in return for my lousy half-dozen smoked bluefish fillets:

4 ripe tomatoes
1 black-staining polypore
a container of mushrooms that may or may not be chanterelles
1 huge bunch celery
a handful of beans
assorted baby peppers and one cute little eggplant
a bunch of shiso
marjoram, thyme, and two kinds of mint, ready to plant
4 perfect leeks
a bunch of chard
a jar of pickles
3 fat cucumbers
a container of herbs de Provence
6 little Thai peppers
1 cantaloupe
1 long, skinny, Japanese cucumber

And it would have been more, except that I absolutely forbade Al and Christl to give me anything. They’ve been so generous with the things they grow that I wanted to get something in the plus column. Besides, I was already so loaded up from Amanda and Doug and Dianne that I was too embarrassed to take anything more.  But Christl pressed the Japanese cucumber on me, and I couldn’t resist.

It honestly didn’t occur to me that, if I showed up at the homes of gardeners, in the height of vegetable season, with a measly little gift of bluefish that they would load me up with the bounty of their gardens. If it had occurred to me, I probably would have done it sooner.

The bounty

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The best part of learning something new is the first five minutes because that’s when you go from nothing to something. From that point on, you’re just going from something to something more. At first, that, too, is significant. In the second five minutes, you double your knowledge! But then the increments start getting smaller and smaller.

The best part of learning something new is the first five minutes

Take cooking. If you’ve never so much as boiled water, you pick up a book like Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, and you follow the straightforward instructions. Voila! Your first beef stew. It’s a pretty good beef stew, and it is literally infinitely better than any beef stew you’ve made before because it’s your first.

Then you graduate, maybe to the more complicated Boeuf Bourguignon of Julia Child. And your stew gets better. A lot better. But start moving on to the recipes of some of today’s restaurant chefs and it’s not nearly as satisfying. The instructions get more complicated, the incremental improvement gets smaller, and before you know it you’re throwing The French Laundry Cookbook across the room because Thomas Keller’s beef stew requires carrots from a region of Alsace-Lorraine you’ve never even heard of.

Let me be clear: I am very glad there are people like Thomas Keller in the world, getting their carrots from Alsace-Lorraine and making the very best beef stew that it is possible to make. I have eaten in one of Thomas Keller’s restaurants, and I hope to do it again some time. But I tend to lose interest in small increments. I want the big jumps.

This may be why I like fishing. Before I came here, I had never caught a fish bigger than my hand. I’d gotten a few snapper bluefish with Kevin a few years back, and I think I got a perch or two in my childhood, but I had never reeled in a substantial fish.

In the past year, I have gone from nothing to something on the fishing learning curve. I’ve caught bluefish, striped bass, scup, and fluke. I’ve learned a little bit about how to find the fish, and what to use to catch them. I have a couple of favorite spots for the different kinds of fish, and I know how those different kinds feel on the line. Even so, I’m still on the steep part of the curve, and expect to be for quite some time.

On our last trip, a couple weeks back, I learned not to bait my hook while staring at the horizon, and not to wear shorts that become transparent when wet. Yesterday’s trip, combined with an aborted attempt the day before, had different lessons.

LESSON ONE: Hydrodynamics.

We decided to try for bluefish at Horseshoe Shoal, a big, shallow area about six miles due south of Osterville. Friday morning we checked the weather, and it looked pretty good. The wind was out of the north and wasn’t supposed to be more than about 10 knots.

Going south out of Osterville, you’re in about twenty feet of water for a couple of miles, and then you hit the shipping channel, which is upwards of eighty feet deep. Get through that, and you’re at Horseshoe Shoal, where the depth varies from about twenty feet to mere inches in low tide in some spots.

When small waves in eighty feet of water hit a spot that’s only twenty feet deep, they become big waves.

On Friday, those waves weren’t absolutely unmanageable, but they were big enough to be uncomfortable. We gave it a shot, but when the bluefish didn’t seem to be in evidence, we turned around and headed in.

The next day (yesterday), the wind was a little calmer, and out of the south-east. We came to the spot where the depth went from eighty to twenty feet, and what did I see? It was calmer. Huh?

Of course! Because the wind was coming from the other side of the shoal, the small waves that turned into big waves were on that side. On our side (the north side), the water had had the entire breadth of the shoal to calm down, and had become friendly little swells.

LESSON TWO: Bluefish teeth.

Bluefish bite marks on a sand eel lure

Amy, who owns Sports Port, our favorite bait and tackle shop, had warned Kevin about using rubber lures for bluefish. We lost one whole one and the tails of two others before we switched to metal.

That’s about when I realized that Kevin’s warning about flip-flops ought to be heeded. As I value my toes, I switched to neoprene booties.

I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea that there’s a bluefish out there, as we speak, trying to digest the missing half of my pink Sluggo, but given the bluefish’s voracious appetitive, I’m figuring they have a pretty robust digestive system. They wouldn’t have evolved to eat just about anything unless their systems could handle just about anything. Of course, pink Sluggos, being a recent innovation, weren’t among the forces that shaped bluefish evolution, so that may be wishful reasoning.

LESSON THREE: Ice.

You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ice.

LESSON FOUR: Gizmos.

A couple months ago, Kevin bought two fishing chairs at a yard sale. When he saw them, he got very excited. “Look honey,” he told me, pointing. “Those are the chairs we need. They fold up for storage, and they each have a gimble.”

A gimble? What the hell’s a gimble? That’s not even a word, except in The Jabberwocky. Were we planning to gyre in the wabe with the slithy toves?

A chair with a gimbal

Turns out it’s not a gimble. It’s a gimbal, which is not just a word, but is also a gizmo. It’s a gizmo in the center of a fishing chair, between your legs, in which to put your fishing rod. When you have a fish on the line, you put the butt of your rod in it. It moves in every direction so you can follow the fish with your tip, but it frees you from having to hold the rod up.

“You’ll be glad to have that when you’re bringing in a big fish,” Kevin told me.

I nodded and smiled, confident that I had the strength and stamina to bring in any fish without the assistance of a rod-holding gizmo. Gimbals, I figured, were for sissies.

Gimbals, I’m here to tell you, aren’t for sissies. I didn’t actually need it to reel any of the four-pound bluefish I caught, but those fish gave enough fight to understand why gimbals aren’t for sissies.

LESSON FIVE: Quality time.

For several months now, I’ve been a bad wife. Between my freelance work, this blog, and a book due at my publisher September first (don’t ask), I’ve been about as overwhelmed with work as I have ever been since I started writing for a living over a decade ago. It’s been hard to find time to actually do the things I write about, and when I’m not actually sitting at the computer, typing, I’m writing things in my head.

Kevin has found it increasingly difficult to break through.

I knew I was distracted, but it wasn’t until we were having a conversation with some friends about birthday presents that I understood the magnitude of the problem. Kevin and I usually have a hard time thinking of gifts, either for ourselves or each other, because we’re lucky enough to not want much that we don’t already have. This time, though, he had an answer ready when someone asked him what the perfect birthday gift would be.

“My wife’s undivided attention.”

Surely, if you can give your spouse nothing else, you can give that.

He smiled a little ruefully when he said it. It wasn’t mean-spirited. Kevin knows I’m doing this because I’m trying both to hold up my end in the income department and to revive a moribund career too long neglected. His patience with my distraction is almost infinite.

That’s not a limit I want to test.

Yesterday, we spent six hours together on a nineteen-foot boat. There was no Internet, no phone, no interruption, no distraction. It was a beautiful day. We caught ten feisty bluefish, and lost as many, sometimes just as we got them up to the boat. We talked to no one but each other.

It was the best day I’ve had in a very long time.

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It started with yesterday morning’s fishing trip. We went out at about 7:00 AM, in search of scup, bluefish, or both.

Scup fishing and bluefish fishing are very different. Scup feed on the bottom, and eat crustaceans and miscellaneous invertebrates. Bluefish feed on the top or in the middle, and eat pretty much anything that swims, including other bluefish. For scup, we use squid for bait, weight the line, and jig it off the bottom. For bluefish, we use popper lures that float on the surface and jump when you give the line a tug.

Kevin rigged up both kinds of rods, and we set out.

Our scup fishing grounds are in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Mashpee, which is the town just to the west of us. To get there, where have to go through our bluefish fishing grounds, which are just outside Cotuit Bay. Our plan was to head out for scup, stopping for bluefish if we saw any.

We did see bluefish, and we managed to get eight small ones before the school disappeared. Mixed in with the bluefish were a few schoolie stripers, and Kevin caught one that was about eighteen inches, ten inches short of legal.

Fishing Trip Lesson #1: One advantage of top fishing is that, when a fish bites through your line, you can retrieve your lure because it floats.

When we lost sight of the bluefish, we headed out for scup.

The bluefish were in a relatively sheltered area, but the scup were in open water. The difference between a relatively sheltered area and open water became immediately apparent as the boat started rocking and plunging in three-foot seas.

We reached our spot, baited our hooks, and let the boat drift.

Fishing Trip Lesson #2: To minimize seasickness when drifting on a significant swell, face into the wind so you can see the waves coming at you. Keep your eyes on the horizon.

Fishing Trip Lesson #3: Keeping your eyes on the horizon while baiting a hook is an enterprise fraught with peril.

We started landing scup and small sea bass almost immediately, but none were big enough to keep. Then I felt something weird on my line. It was definitely a fish, but it didn’t pull like a scup. It also felt bigger than anything I’d pulled in so far. I kept reeling, and as soon as Kevin caught a glimpse of it in the water, he said, “That’s a fluke!”

My trophy fluke

The fish flashed its underbelly. “That’s a keeper fluke!” he said, and went for the net.

We’d heard that the fluke were biting all over the Cape, but that most of them were under the 18.5-inch minimum size for taking. A keeper fluke is a prize fish.

I reeled, Kevin netted, and we landed a beautiful 20-inch fluke.

By now, you’ve probably forgotten that this is a story of something I didn’t screw up. In case you haven’t, let me assure you that landing the fluke was not it. That was an accident – maybe that’s why they call them ‘flukes.’ The part I didn’t screw up comes later.

We managed one keeper scup to add to our stash, and I also got my first look at a sea robin, a weird fish with legs that walks on the seabed. Then we headed back, into the wind and the chop.

Our boat is a fairly dry ride, but nothing stays dry when you’re riding plunging into three-foot troughs while the next wave comes over the bow. Somehow, though, it’s easier to brave the sea when you’re headed in with a cooler full of fish.

Fishing Trip Lesson #4: Tan nylon shorts become perfectly transparent when wet. Wear underpants.

We made it home just fine, and unloaded our cooler. Most of the bluefish were small, and destined to be lobster bait, but I fileted the biggest two for us.

Then I tackled the fluke.

I’d never fileted a fluke. In fact, the only fish I have fileted are bluefish and striped bass. The principle’s the same, though, so I laid out the fish and started cutting.

There’s a certain amount of pressure in fileting a prize fish. While I know a fluke isn’t so special, it was the only one we caught, and possibly the only one we’ll catch all season. Kevin is very fond of fluke, and was looking forward to eating it. I didn’t want to botch it.

I went slowly and carefully. I felt for the bones and the body cavity. I took shallow passes with the knife, and peeled up the filet as I released it from the body. I did the thick side first, and then the more difficult thinner side (flat fish being comically asymmetrical).

OK, so it's not a Pulitzer

I didn’t screw it up. My filets were beautiful. Not perfect, but definitely better than good. And I took an absurd, unwarranted, disproportional amount of pride in them. I mean, really, for chrissake, it’s not such a big hairy deal to filet a fish.

So why did those filets matter so much to me? Dinner would have been just as tasty and nutritious if I had butchered them, and nothing would change the fact that I’d caught this fish myself and was feeding my family with it. I think, though, that being able to process a fish with some modicum of skill made me feel competent, and competence is something slow in coming in most of what we’re doing out here.

For the meta-skills involved – gardening, fishing, hunting, animal husbandry – the acquisition of competence is a long process of education, trial, and error, and I am unlikely to master any of them in what’s left of my lifetime. But if I break those skills down, and try to master discrete sub-skills, one at a time, small triumphs are within my reach.

I’m not much of a gardener, but I know how to fight late blight on my tomatoes. I’m not too good with chickens, but I know how to break a broody hen. I’m nobody’s mycologist, but I know a bolete when I see one. I’m a novice fisherman, but if anybody asks, the answer is yes – I can filet a fish.

I can filet a fish.

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