ave been good fishing for cunners. Like
Carker this fish comes to you teeth first. His mouth is so full of
them that they stick out like quills on the fretful porcupine.
Nature, which gives each tools for the trade which he most loves,
made him a bait-stealer extraordinary with these.

The beginner who fishes in the salt sea does it almost invariably
with a pole, whether from cliff or dock or from a boat. Experience
brings the desire for the hand line. The farmer's boy who comes
down for the salt hay tucks his long birch pole into the bottom of
the wagon and the trolley tripper comes to the beach with his
split bamboo. Down in Maine years ago the pinkies used to sail
equipped with numerous short poles whereby to trail for mackerel.
In the day of your grandfather and mine it must have been a sight
to see the crew of a pink-sterned chebacco boat dancing from pole
to pole flipping the number ones aboard when a good school struck
in. Of course, all that is a waste of energy and of wood. A hand
line is the more intimate and serves the purpose better. A man is
not really a salt water fisherman till he has learned the use of
one. Then let him go forth. Through that line shall flow to his
nerve ganglia deep sea knowledge galore. By it shall come to him
in time all creatures of the vast deep.

*****

Lovers of deep sea fishing grow best from small beginnings. They
yearn from tide flats to the spar buoy in the harbor channel,
thence through Hull Gut to the rocky bottoms about the Brewsters.
After that the sirens sing to them from every wash of white waves
over ledges far out to sea, caution drowns in the temptation of
blue water, and they fish no more except it is "down outside."
They who dwell on the very rim of this deep sea, at Marblehead or
Nahant, at Cohasset or at Duxbury never know the full depth of its
lure as do those who must win to it from the Dorchester flats or
the winding reaches of the Fore River. To these latter only is the
perfection of desire and the full joy of fulfilment. You can leave
the shallow bays inland only when the tide serves, hence gropings
for a tender on the beach of starlit mornings, the chuckle of
halliard blocks in the rose of dawn and a long drift in the pink
glow of morning fog while the boom swings idly and the turn of the
flood drifts you eastward. Little wayward winds, too lazy to make
a ripple on the glassy surface of the water or stir the sail, play
strange tricks with this morning f