Between an impending move, frantic summer travels, this here full-time gig, and a sleep deficit to rival my so-called higher-learning days, my head was so far up my own exhaust manifold—what with trying to sneak in moments to fish, surf, and find solace in addition—that I was growing increasingly detached from my nuclear unit at home.
It had gotten to the point that my three-year-old son, Louis, was automatically saying “Bye-bye, Daddy” after spending a few precious moments together in the morning while I cooked him an egg or blended him his preferred “green juice”—his daily dose of vegetables in disguise. I was, at minimum, making sure he was nourished enough. But there was a distance growing between us, and his interest in monster trucks and trains—things about which I know less than nil—left a further chasm of interests.
And so, with fall closing in and an eye on an idle day with a forecast of idle weather, I decided to wake Louis early one morning, toss him in the car before the crosstown traffic had us in its grips, and steal up to Connecticut to commandeer his uncle’s center console—an early-aughts, 17-foot Cape Craft—for a day on the water.
A stop at a favorite delicatessen produced bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches on Kaiser rolls—our ritual fortification on father-son excursions. Louis kept a firm grip on his first half as I wrangled him into his much-detested lifevest and helped him rappel his way down the steep gangway to the dock at low tide.
“Uncle Nate’s boat!” He shouted. Indeed. I mused at how clean and tidy “Uncle Nate’s boat” is compared to how I’d often find my first vessel, a 16-foot Sturdee Boat Co. lapstrake dory, Blues’ Dory, after Nate had her out for a spin or three. A sense of ownership has a way of changing how you take care of things.
And so it goes that, as Louis stepped aboard, he had no qualms about smearing runny egg yolk and melted, tangerine-orange American cheese along the console and up to the cushion on his preferred throne atop the livewell forward of the console.
Let’s just let that bake in this sweet late summer sun, I caught myself thinking, before thinking better and wiping it clean with a napkin.
Turning the engine over, checking the gauges, and stowing gear and rods in compartments, I marveled further still at the organization and cleanliness aboard this new sled, dubbed Blues’ Craft—a definitive upgrade from Blues Dory perhaps not in class but in fishability. I was all too ready to helm from a cushioned lean post as opposed to my old stiff, mahogany thwart, standing in the slushy bilge.
With a canvased T-top, a livewell, and lunch in the Yeti Tundra cooler, we were highfalutin and ready for anything. Louis was suddenly animated with me in a way he hadn’t been all summer, not even over a slice of coveted pizza or a gelato at the park. I was reliving transiting the mouth of the Mianus River for the first time. And I was starting to loosen up, too.
But, being the itinerant angler that I am, my thoughts turned immediately to fish. I have this deep-seated—and, I think, well-founded—fear that, like my father before me, my angling affinity will skip a generation and Louis will take to something like football, or, well, trains and monster trucks. So be it, I tell myself, but a tiny part of me dies a little as I try to accept what I’ve convinced myself is an inevitability.
How do I fight these intrusive thoughts? By turning into a hack of an Ahab, of course. We WILL catch that 50-pound striper today. In September, in these waters? Sure. Well, we will at least find the motherlode of porgies and fill the cooler. In this southwesterly chop that’s whipped up against the forecast I’d quadruple-checked this morning? A chop that will now bind us to the shallows in the harbor? Nope, a motherlode of porgy is probably not all that likely, either. Before I could demure in premature defeat, Louis grasped my full attention by working his way up to his—and any thrill-seeking child’s—true favorite point on a boat: the pointy end.
I may be an indulgent father, but this is a no-no under my command. I dropped back into neutral, grabbed the little mutineer, and plopped him on the leaning post beside me, doing my best to search for and settle on a gameplan that would put at least a fish or two in the boat.
Fluke season was still open, and I have a channel that I keep in my back pocket for just such an occasion. It’s one of those spots that’s probably overfished—especially by this point in the season—but it would suit our purposes.
A bucket of throwing stones—pilfered from the marina parking lot—served as entertainment and distraction (hat-tip to my father for that little trick) while I rigged and tipped bucktails with, (gulp!) soft plastics.
With just a bit of tide starting to filter in and a southwesterly funneling up into the cove, I decided to keep the old but trusty two-stroke Yamaha 70 purring so I could bump it in and out of gear to slow our drift as we worked the sandy contour.
“Okay, Louis, let’s fish.”
“No!”
“Okay, Daddy will fish.”
Silence.
My heart sank a little, yet again.
Setting one lightweight spinning rod in a holster to let the boat do the work, I grabbed a second outfit and began to give it life, hoping if one approach didn’t work, the other would.
Well, as soon as I started turning the reel to match the rising sandbar beneath us, those rocks were nothing but dead weight to Louis. He turned toward me, grabbed the rod, and immediately wanted to figure out how that reel worked. Like the Cyclone at Coney Island, like the L-train beside our house, like the axles on his Tonka trucks. A gearhead is as a gearhead does.
Just as we came off the back side of the sandbar, a good fluke hooked itself on the rod in our hands. I tried to set the hook before leaving it to Louis, but he had a deathgrip on the reel and foregrip of the rod, and began fighting me, not the fish, and was attempting to sink a precious few hundred dollars into the murky, brown, Western Long Island Sound.
Sure enough, the fish took advantage of the slack and that was that.
We took a consolation break for a faceful of chicken and french fries up in the bow, and the wounds of the lost fish were good as licked. But a few more fruitless drifts later and Louis had had it. It was hot, he still hadn’t seen a fish, and we were rocking and rolling in this upgraded but still quite minuscule good ship, Blues Craft.
Did Louis care whether a fish came over the rail? Probably not. Did he put up with a day on the water? You bet. And previous boat outings—episodes of seasickness on a pair of rough ferry rides—haven’t traumatized him to the point of no return. Here’s hoping I don’t do so, either. We’ll call this one a win.
This article originally appeared in the April 2026 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
