"Boater" wrote in message
...


Thirty two miles from here is just more of the Bay.


My condolences.

Move to where the real ocean is. :-)


Seriously, what I enjoyed the most of having the Egg Harbor and doing the
cod fishing runs was the whole ritual. It started at about 4:30 am. I
usually slept on the boat the night before and the crew (usually my brother
or son ... or both) and the fishing party would show up just before dawn.
Even in the summer, it would be chilly, so the party would stand around in
jackets or sweatshirts, downing one of those big box jugs of "Joe" from
Dunkin' Donuts. We used to invite different people for each trip, usually
guys from work or friends that wanted to go.

We'd fire up the diesels just as the sun was about to rise and head out. It
usually took about an hour and a half to get to my secret, GPS recorded
"spot". It was in about 260 feet of water, but had a bottom structure that
rose up about 30 or 35 feet. I'd position the boat relative to the wind so
it would drift over the structure. Usually it was dead calm, so the boat
didn't move very quickly, but if the wind was up a bit, we'd deploy a sea
anchor off the starboard or port beam cleat (depending on wind) to slow the
drift.

My brother and/or son would instruct the fishing party on how to "rotate" in
the cockpit while hauling in the cod. My job was simply to call "lines in"
when it was time for me to reposition the boat for another drift over the
structure, and watch the fish finder. I'd zoom in to the bottom 10 feet and
could actually see the lines from the rods and the red blobs of cod moving
towards the jigs.

After about 3 or 5 hours the fish wells in the boat would be pretty much
full of cod and a few haddock.
By then everyone's arms were getting tired (it's quite a bit of work
hauling a big cod or two up from that depth) and I could sense that everyone
on board was happy and satisfied. "Lines in" and we'd head back.
I remember one trip in particular ... we headed back to port with over 600
lbs of cod in the wells.

After docking, the cleaning started, both fish and the boat. We usually
drew quite an audience of "gawkers" .... people standing up on the sidewalk
watching the process of hauling cod after cod out of the well and over to
the cleaning table. The fishing party would celebrate the day with a few
brews and then take their respective coolers filled with cod fillets home to
the wife and kids.

The reality of it struck one day as one group was leaving. One of the guys
came over to thank us for the day and told me that I probably didn't even
realize that to him the fishing trip was the highlight of his summer.

It was pretty cool.

Eisboch