The Tar Heel Outdoorsman

My blog has been dormant like an alligator in the winter mud.  I'm trying to awaken it from its slumber.    In an attempt to rouse this online place where I occasionally jot some things down, I'm looking back a ways, back to March of '22.  A darn fine weekend.  Or a collection of a few weekends.  Regardless, darn fine.  Oysters and drum and cool, clean, and clear salt water, and azaleas in bloom.     Picking oysters---knocking the too-small ones off the clusters, toss the ones you keep in the fish basket sitting in the still cold, early spring, southeastern Carolina water, still cold and clean, maybe even shuck one of the bivalves for a briny mid morning snack, or maybe it was mid afternoon.  Find a few mussels too, just poking through a mud bank of a small creek, pull them, often connected together in a big clump, out of that dark rich mud that smells like marsh.   A few drum---casting up on the oyster bank, let the jig a...

          There's the sound of a splash.  Over there.  Off to the right.  Right on the edge of that thin, stick-like, sparse and spread out bit of spartina grass.  25 yards from the skiff and closing, with the boat drifting ever closer as the tide pulls it out of the tidal salt marsh.  Ever closer.  Won't be long until the fish sees the boat and it'll be too late.  There's a wake, like a bow-wave of some miniature coastal Carolina submarine, chasing bait.             Sling a cast just ahead of it.  Bump.  Bump.  The line goes tight, you feel the tension, you set the hook, and the rod bends over.  The fish runs.  Line peels off the spool.  Steer him clear of the oysters.  You work him back.  He runs again.  Work him in, closer and closer.  Closer.  Scoop him in the net.  Doesn't get much prettier.  

Things start where they often do.  The truck.   Throw the kayak in there, since the skiff's in the shop, and stick the 8 weight through the sliding back window.  Grab your flies and a water bottle.  Paddle and a life jacket too.  Good to go.

Since mid May, I'd been living up in Washington, in the big city, with all its people, buildings, monuments, ever-confusing traffic circles, its Metro system, and not nearly as much fishing as I'd have liked. I was wishing I was fishing.