Natural history -- Massachusetts; Natural history -- Outdoor books; Plymouth County (Mass.)
Lovers of deep sea fishing grow best from small beginnings. They
yearn from tide flats to the spar buoy in the harbor channel,
thence through Hull Gut to the rocky bottoms about the Brewsters.
After that the sirens sing to them from every wash of white waves
over ledges far out to sea, caution drowns in the temptation of
blue water, and they fish no more except it is "down outside."
They who dwell on the very rim of this deep sea, at Marblehead or
Nahant, at Cohasset or at Duxbury never know the full depth of its
lure as do those who must win to it from the Dorchester flats or
the winding reaches of the Fore River. To these latter only is the
perfection of desire and the full joy of fulfilment. You can leave
the shallow bays inland only when the tide serves, hence gropings
for a tender on the beach of starlit mornings, the chuckle of
halliard blocks in the rose of dawn and a long drift in the pink
glow of morning fog while the boom swings idly and the turn of the
flood drifts you eastward. Little wayward winds, too lazy to make
a ripple on the glassy surface of the water or stir the sail, play
strange tricks with this morning fog. They carve chasms in it and
open tunnels down which you see far for a moment, then they wind
it like a wet sheet about you and you may not see the bobstay from
your post at the tiller.
[Illustration: Outward Bound in Plymouth Harbor]
They bring you sounds and scents from afar. You know you are
abreast Grape Island now far you scent the wild roses on the
point. Another breeze brings faint odors of the charnel house from
Bradley's. A stronger chases it away and you have a whiff of an
early breakfast, brown toast, fried fish and coffee, at Rose
Cliff. The chuckle of oars in rowlocks tells you that the old
fisherman is astir at Fort Point and the man with the new motor
boat over at Hough's Neck is giving it a little run before
breakfast, with the muffler off, as usual. A gull goes over,
flying low. You do not see but you hear the soft swish of the
wings. By and by the sun shows through a rift in the fog and you
begin to move before a faint air from the southwest. A half hour
more and the shreds of fog are melting upward into the blue of a
clear day, the wind fills your sail and you are sweeping eastward
with wind and tide round the Sheep Island bar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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