Grandma Goes Fishing

‘YOUR grandmother goes fishing!' If Grandma, who can claim her threescore and ten, golfed or bowled or played the trumpet, the matter would cause small comment. But fishing!

Public reaction to so unconventional an idea is usually scornful incredulity. Apparently it is socially comme il faut for gentlemen of grandfatherly persuasion to pursue the finny tribe, but not for a woman with three up-and-coming grandchildren.

Perhaps such discrimination is the result of jealousy. In our own family it might well be, for when we want fresh fish it’s Grandma who can be counted on, with devastating certainty, to catch the first fish, the last, the biggest, the most.

But being unique does n’t worry Grandma. She dons knickers, a disreputable jacket, a straw hat of the sort formerly used to protect horses’ heads from the summer sun, and fares forth. To Grandma a fishhook is a fishhook. What need, then, to talk about Limericks or Carlisles or sneck bents? The language of angling paraphernalia is no more intelligible to Grandma than Sanskrit or Swahili. The patter of the most enterprising high-pressure salesman would n’t make a dent in the armor of her noncomprehension — or her sales resistance. She’d probably end up by convincing him that he ought to be fishing, not talking about it!

Snappers first introduced Grandma to the delights of angling. Grandfather and Uncle George had been stirring up a great to-do about the prospective fishing — immensely long bamboo poles cluttered up the decks of the Dolphin, bait and tackle boxes were underfoot, dinner-table conversation was liberally besprinkled with ‘snapper.’ Grandma alone took no part in the hubbub. She watched the preparations incuriously, only bristling indignantly when she encountered an uncovered bait can in the icebox.

Grandfather and Uncle George established themselves and their impedimenta on the afterdeck and fished — and fished — and fished. Nothing happened. They rearranged tackle, they changed bait. Still nothing happened.

Finally Grandma looked up from the sheet she was hemming.

‘Here, let me try that long switch!’ she demanded.

Grandfather looked dumfounded, but he surrendered his pole, partly out of sheer surprise at the request, partly out of disgust with the entire snapper situation.

Grandma cast about wildly, narrowly missing the left ear of a passing rower; she plopped bait and hook into the water with the finesse of a coal heaver.

‘No, Addie,’ Grandfather began. ‘That’s not the way! ’

‘What’s not the way?’ Grandma wanted to know, swinging a shiny snapper aboard. ‘Is n’t this what you’re trying to catch?’

Faced with an argument so unanswerable, Grandfather retreated in more haste than good order. He recalled, suddenly, an urgent job in the galley.

Grandma fished. She pulled in snappers with clocklike precision. It seemed as though the fish had a private rendezvous with her hook — they appeared to be milling around, jostling one another for the privilege of swallowing her bait. Over what Grandfather thought of the performance I draw a kindly veil.

From snappers Grandma was promoted to weakfish. The first time she tried weakfishing the wind was wrong, the tide was wrong, the hour was wrong — at least that’s what the captain of the fishing boat averred, and he ought to have known. But did it deter Grandma? Dear, no! She was out to catch fish. What possible connection could wind, tide, or hour have with weakfish that were, presumably, swimming peacefully in the briny depths, far from the upper elements and certainly without watches in their pockets? Grandma caught weakfish — the rest of us caught dogfish and sea robins.

Grandfather began to view the situation with growing alarm. At first Grandma’s success had looked like an exaggerated case of beginner’s luck. Her fishing technique was too naïve, too utterly amateurish to stand a chance with Grandfather’s knowledge and experience. Why, he had been fishing, man and boy, for upwards of sixty years. Grandfather, poor soul, was unaware that as an angler Grandma was a ‘natural.’

Then came a trip to the North Woods, and Grandfather expanded. Now he would come into his own once more. Grandma, praise be, knew nothing about the art of fly casting. So Grandfather, his self-respect restored, went off with his masculine cronies to pursue the speckled trout, and Grandma, forsaken, did some thinking.

Below the hill upon which the camp cabins stood were the remains of an old dam, a pleasant retreat and a good place from which to view the water beneath its wide-spaced timbers. One day Grandma climbed up from the dam with determination in her step and battle in her eye. She went into solemn conclave with the man-around-camp, who could presently be observed cavorting in a near-by clearing. Grandma disappeared into the woods, from which she soon emerged with a not too straight, newly cut pole. She collected a hook and a length of line from Grandfather’s paraphernalia and a can of fresh-caught grasshoppers from the manaround-camp. Then Grandma repaired to the dam.

Just what the old trout thought when he discovered a lively grasshopper disturbing his quiet pool is not on record. At any rate he stopped his lazy fin-waving in order to investigate the unusual phenomenon and found himself, suddenly and without ceremony, flopping helplessly on the warm timbers of the dam.

Six of his relatives followed him at short intervals before the rest of the tribe decided that there were safer places in the Spencer than this particular pool.

At twilight Grandfather and his cronies returned from their hegira. They were lugging their expensive rods, their beautiful, expensive reels, their capacious and singularly empty creels.

To-day Florida is Grandma’s favorite haunt. She catches sailfish on a handline and all manner of things, from the speedy bonefish to the ponderous grouper, on tackle that has only one virtue — it holds together. In a wildly tossing motorboat she glues herself to a chair that is providentially bolted to the deck, and fishes. Grandfather fishes, too, but he is content now, having achieved acquiescence, to catch three fish to Grandma’s nineteen or thirty-nine, as the case may be; he even takes pride in the angling prowess of this partner of his and recounts her exploits to his cronies, who are inclined to be politely, and perhaps justifiably, incredulous.

A grandmother who fishes! Well, there are limits to what a person can believe, even in fish stories.