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When
I was 10 years old my parents owned a house in Mystic Island, New Jersey.
It was one of those sleepy beach towns where everyone has a dock, a boat,
and plenty of Avon Skin-So-Soft to repel the biting flies. To fit in with
his neighbors, my dad bought a 23-foot fishing boat, which my family and
I went out on every weekend.
Fishing
with my dad was always fun: I never had to bait my hook, touch my catch,
or witness that catch become dinner. I just sat back, held the rod, and
reeled when my dad told me to. (All glory, no guts.) Crewing, however,
was a different matter. During the trips to and from the fishing spots,
my sister and I would grab the docklines and my mom would throw out the
fenders, as my dad scraped the boat’s sides against every dock in
his path. As the lines on our neighbors’ crab traps snapped, profanities
would fly out of my dad’s mouth.
This
was the extent of my angling and boat-handling education until last November
when I received a call from Wellcraft. The builder had teamed up with
the Sea Island Yacht Club in Sea Island, Georgia, to create the Wellcraft
Saltwater Fishing School, and I was invited to test-drive the program.
According
to Bob Edwards, director of sportfishing at Sea Island Yacht Club, many
would-be anglers spend thousands of dollars on boats and gear only to
end up disappointed by a lack of fish or worse, in a situation where they
lack crucial knowledge about fishing and boat handling. Enter the Wellcraft
Saltwater Fishing School, a three-day course designed for boaters who
want to learn or improve fishing and boating skills. While the idea sounded
great, the location was not quite what I had imagined for a fishing school:
The Cloister is a beautiful 70-year-old resort on Sea Island, Georgia,
which has hosted dignitaries and celebrities. It’s the kind of place
where every dinner is five courses, Godiva chocolates are on your pillow
every night, and lobster is plentiful at every meal.
My eight
classmates and I arrived on a Sunday night and, after dinner, retired
to our rooms. Class began at 8 the next morning, as we all filed into
a conference-room-turned-classroom where we would cover about 10 topics,
including weather, navigation, and fish biology. I anxiously flipped through
the five-inch-thick binder filled with maps, articles, and diagrams as
our head teachers, Gordon Rogers and Capt. A.G. “Spud” Woodward,
introduced the staff. The five men—Capt. Toby Mohrman, Mike Kennedy,
Capt. Donnie Revels, Capt. Jeff Glenn, and Sean McCala—were all
tournament fishermen, local guides, or both.
We spent the morning covering everything from a fish’s sense of
smell—a salmon can sense 1 ppm of scent, equal to about 12 drops,
in a swimming pool of water—to fisheries management and boating
safety. Most of the material was new to me, but even the more experienced
anglers remained interested throughout the hours of lectures and hands-on
exercises in subjects like dead reckoning.
Next page >
Part 2: Fly-Casting, and More > Page 1, 2,
3
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