Another day, another... flounder?

My brother-in-law and I went fishing this weekend, on an unseasonably cold Father's Day. Fortunately the rain from the night before had pretty much cleared out, so even though it was chilly it was a good day to fish. George caught a flounder before I even had time to rig my own line! And then I caught a skate, which has to be one of the ugliest sea creatures I've ever had the opportunity to see alive and up close. I also had something that looked like a severed tentacle stuck to my hook that squirted water when I tried to take it off. A sea cucumber? Truly weird.

After our initial success, we then settled in for a four-hour stretch of feeding the fish. But you know what? It didn't really matter. There's something about being out on that pier between Lynn and Revere when the tide is coming in so strong that you'd swear you were white-water rafting, I have to say, that makes me wonder why it's taken me so many years of living in New England to finally buy a rod and reel and get out and try to catch some fish.

There was a Cuban man crabbing off the pier right next to us. We struck up a conversation, and asked him what he was going to do with all the crabs he caught (we assumed he'd use them for bait, or maybe cook them down into broth like the Cambodian and Vietnamese crabbers do). He told us he'd take them home and give them to his wife, who would cover them with Chinese fish sauce until they'd basically been pickled in the brine, at which point you can eat them as a snack. Never in a million years would I have guessed that! And it sounds mighty tasty, although I'd worry about eating shellfish downstream from the General Electric plant... Then again, I've heard of people eating blue crabs out of the Meadowlands and Newark Bay all their lives, and what on earth could be more toxic than that?

So the score this season, after three days of fishing: George 1, Me 1. Skates may be ugly, but a fish is a fish!