SPRING SILVER
You start your day hours before sunup, drive the dirt roads and rig in the dark, but the reward makes it worthwhile: hickory shad on fly without another soul around. By GARY REICH
signs changes your fishing. The fish becomes a stock, a resource, something to be managed. It can swell your ego — anyone who doesn’t catch thousands of pounds doesn’t know a thing. We become experts. The youth and mystery are gone, evaporated. All that is left is hard rock. It’s as if the initial smell and colors of the fish are no longer even noticed — a loss that represents the enemy of midlife. Getting those colors back is no simple feat, to become the boy on the pier again, seeing things for the first time. Oh, to be lost, happy, bored, swept up in the moment and agenda-free.
Fresh Eyes
In time, we often come back to a new starting place, and so I’ve taken up free diving. It’s one breath and down, nothing but lungs. To me, it’s a new way of seeing. I’m far from being the next Rachel Carson; often, I’m diving with a speargun and the full intention of bringing home dinner. But at the bottom, I like the colors of the Rhode Island ocean, the monotone green, the rocks and the kelp. In summer, I see lots of baby scup hanging over shallow reefs, moving cloudlike about 4 feet off the bottom. I get a sense of the scup’s abundance when I swim into these herds, which stretch, end to end, as far as I can swim.
I love to see the juveniles, tiny and more transparent than the adults, more pelagic, less benthic. Usually around these scup shoals are a few predators, maybe a sea bass or a striper. Sometimes I’ll spear dinner; sometimes I won’t.
For whatever reason, adult scup spook easily underwater. When I see them, I almost always see a fleet of tails moving away. And most of the fish seem to be outside of my free-diving comfort zone. Striped bass and blackfish will often be in water less than 10 feet deep, but scup, at least where I dive, are generally outside of 25 feet, out in the green murk, in water that can get eerie, giving me the sense of being more prey than predator.
Diving near the entrance to the West Passage of Narragansett Bay a couple of years ago, I took a breath and swam down along a rock wall. I kept swimming until I hit the bottom. I knew I was deep because the water got dark, cold and creepy. I looked up the wall toward sunlight and began to move up, using my hands. Everything was swaying: me, the water, the kelp. Then, above me, I saw them. At first the sight was just their outlines, their silhouettes, backlit against the sky. It was a pair of them. Big ones. Jumbos — the biggest scup I had seen in four years of diving.
I got closer. I could’ve speared one for dinner, an easy shot. But I wanted to observe, not harvest. One of them rolled its body, which shot a flash of silver at me as bright as tin foil. I let it be. And back at the surface, instead of a scup on my stringer, I had an image in my head. There’s a value in that, a value that is hard to measure, part of a story worth remembering.