Gilbert and Johnny laid a gob of squid on the bench end and put a small wet towel over the bait strips. I wondered why they put the bait where we might end up sitting on it so I asked Johnny.
“Mr. Sullivan told us to put it there because if we left it on the cutting board or up on the banister, the sea gulls would carry it off and eat it,” Johnny said. I looked around the pier and saw dozens of sea gulls perched up around the sinks, trashcans, and those fishing. They were sitting, waiting for a fast food opportunity. The sky had eyes. The wet towel was to keep the food hidden, as well as to keep the sun from baking it dry, I guessed; I learned.
I took two strips and pinned them on my hooks. Mr. Sullivan was steady putting fish in the box while Gilbert and Johnny were just getting started. Up on the cooler I went and down went my bottom rig. Again, when the bait hit the bottom, two croakers instantly picked it up. It went on like that for an hour. Gilbert and Johnny tried to go to the other side of the pier, but Mr. Sullivan called them back.
“Why can’t we fish on the other side, Mr. Sullivan?” Johnny asked.
“Son, the tide has just started coming in.”
“So,” quipped Johnny.
“On the other side your bait will get washed up under the pier and get hung up.”
I thought, Things aren’t as random as they first seemed.
For that hour, we were all picking up fish as fast as we could get the bait to the bottom. I’d never experienced fishing like that. It didn’t even feel like fishing. If you had enough skill to get bait to the bottom, without making a mess, you could always catch a fish. I found myself totally in the moment. The heat was gone. There was no wind. There were no odors. I was entirely alone amongst many. The bounty of fish had reduced my world to the tiny area between the banister and the fish cooler on a big pier propped out over an endless ocean. Once Mr. Sullivan asked us to pull the bait out of the fish box and put it in the food cooler, shifting the ice blocks over on top of the fish. We had to shift the ice blocks on top of the fish a second time, before the action began to trickle off and it stopped all together.
“Boys, let me see your fishing poles,” said Mr. Sullivan. He had already gotten his gear ready to travel. He took Gilbert’s first, pushed the clicker button forward, slipped the bottom hook over the top bar on the reel, and wound the fishing line tight. It made several loud clicks before snugging up. After tightening each pole, he picked up the five-gallon bucket and headed down the pier. “Ya’ll get the coolers and find me about half-way down the pier,” he said, walking off.
We three boys stood in silence, looking at one another before Johnny looked into the fish cooler and said, “This ain’t cool.”
The fish cooler lacked but few inches from the top of being full. The fish weren’t big, but it doesn’t take long when four people are putting fish in the box at a quick and steady pace.
“Now what?” Johnny asked exasperated.
“Pull the plug on the cooler and let’s drain the water off,” Gilbert said. He had been here before. About a gallon and a half of water and slime fell between the slits in the pier before becoming slow drips. Gilbert put the plug back in the cooler. Then he opened both coolers up and began to put some blocks of ice in the food cooler to reduce weight from the fish box.
“We need to get rid of this tea and let’s eat the sandwiches, too,” I suggested.
We took a minute to wash up in the sink before eating the sandwiches and tea.
“Man, these sandwiches are all mashed up,” Johnny exclaimed, pulling them out of the bread bag. He was right, for the blocks of ice slid around in the cooler and pressed the sandwiches into some unique shapes, none of which resembled a sandwich. We ate three modern art, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and passed the tea jug around until Johnny noticed a string of PBJ awash in the tea jug. Each of us blamed the other for the backwash. We dumped the rest of the tea between the slits in the pier boards, and the jug was tossed in the closest trashcan.
“We better hurry up and get down the pier, my dad will be waiting,” Gilbert blurted out.
“We ain’t going to be hurrying nowhere,” I responded. We put Johnny in the middle of the cooler train and started down the pier. Making it less than ten feet, a gravity storm hit the fish box, sucking it down to the pier.
“Maybe three of us can carry the fish box and come back for the food cooler,” Gilbert suggested.
“Where is the third guy going to grab the cooler?” I asked.
“Hey, kids!” a man’s voice came from the other side of the pier. In retrospect, the voice may have come from above. “You can use my pier cart to haul those coolers down the pier if you promise to bring it back,” said a middle-aged man we had never seen before.
A collective “Thanks, mister!” came from us. He emptied his stuff out of the pier cart onto a bench. The pier cart was a forever-borrowed rusty shopping cart with six short sections of galvanized pipe sized and staggered so the top of the pipes were always at the height of the basket top. The man helped us lift and position the big cooler across the cart toward the rear and the small cooler on the front of the basket. He loaned us a piece of quarter-inch line to tie down the coolers. Working together, we formed a web with the line by running the line through the basket and over the coolers so they couldn’t move, much, forward, back, or side to side. It was a godsend! I told him it was easier to fish on the other side of the pier where the tide wouldn’t wash his bait under the pier.
He smiled, and said, “Thanks.” We rattled our way down the pier smiling at folks like young men driving a snazzy car.
We found Mr. Sullivan a bit more than halfway down the pier on the left hand side. I didn’t notice earlier, but he had wadded up the squid in the wet towel and put it in the bucket before he walked back down the pier. When he got to where he wanted to fish, he emptied the stuff from the bucket on a bench. Using the bait from the rag, and the empty bucket as a makeshift cooler, he wasn’t waiting on us to get started fishing. The bucket was half-full of fish when we got to him. He lifted the fish cooler from the pier cart after we untangled it from our web of line. As he lifted the small cooler, he asked where we got the cart. We told him the story. He coiled the line neatly, putting it in the bottom of the cart.
“Be sure and tell the man thank you,” he said, as Johnny drove the cart back up the pier solo. Gilbert flipped the fish cooler lid open at his dad’s request, and his dad sloshed the fish from the bucket on top of the fish in the cooler. The cooler was just about full to the brim.
Gilbert and I started fishing with Mr. Sullivan. The action was as fast as it was in the beginning at the end of the pier; all three of us tossing in singles and doubles as quickly as we could get bait to the bottom. In a matter of minutes, the big cooler was full of fish and ice. The lid would just close tight.
“What are we going to do now, Mr. Sullivan?” I asked.
“Open the lid on the small cooler and take the food and bait out.” Gilbert threw the Styrofoam cups in a trashcan and I set the bait on the bench next to his dad. When Johnny returned, all four of us ganged up on the croaker. The steady thud of fish landing in the cooler was like a slow, heavy rain on a tin roof. It was a quick thirty to forty minutes before the cooler was as full of fish as it could get. It ended when Mr. Sullivan told us to stop fishing. All three of us had to throw the fish we had on the line at the time back in the ocean. Mr. Sullivan had to throw some of the fish on top back in order to squeeze the lid shut. It was fun tossing fish off the pier. I wondered what the fish were thinking as they sailed through the air before belly-flopping home. They were the lucky ones with a thrill ride.
Mr. Sullivan walked over to some folks fishing nearby and gave them our leftover bait. When he returned, we were washing the form fitted slime gloves from our hands with a water hose.
“Why did the fish