Rhythms

No, this is not a discussion of natural methods of birth control, bear with me.

Last week my wife and I were in Bethany Beach, Delaware for family vacation (us, her parents, and her three brothers with their wives and children, sixteen people all together). We go on such a vacation almost every year, and I’ve learned that if I want to do something by myself the best time is in the morning, since very little happens until after lunch. Last week was a treat for me; I had an opportunity to do some surf fishing. For the uninitiated, surf fishing involves fishing from the beach, casting your bait into the water beyond the surf. I hadn’t gone surf fishing in over twenty years (since I was in college), but when I was in Junior High and High School my father and I would go surf fishing every other Saturday (when the tides were favorable) all summer.

I’d forgotten how much I love the seashore, in particular spending time on the seashore actually doing something that involved the ocean (as opposed to sitting in a chair reading a book). The seashore is a place of rhythms. There’s the obvious (to a fisherman) twice-daily ebb and flow of the tides, high to low and back to high with the transitions between. Within that is the rhythm of the waves, watching the rod tip as the waves hit the line and bend the rod down, to the unaccustomed it looks like a fish bit (the difference is subtle and nearly indescribable, but obvious once you’ve gotten into the rhythm). Superimposed over the rhythm of the waves, every few waves two will combine to send the water higher up the beach than the others (a good reason to fish barefoot in warm weather or in boots in cool weather). Then every hour or so a wave will wash up even higher, probably hitting your belongings and, if you’re smart or lucky enough to have put them on the downhill side away from the water, washing them further up the beach. Of course if you were neither smart nor lucky, your stuff might well wash out to sea.

There’s something primal about standing there on the seashore, dealing with the ocean on her own terms. If you try to drag your fish to the beach against the under-tow you may snap your line, you have to hold it in place until the flow reduces. Likewise, you have to reel like crazy when the incoming wave hits your fish or the line may slacken enough for the fish to get off the hook (and my personal rule is that if I didn’t hold the fish in my hands I didn’t catch it). You can’t control the ocean; sharks have fed well on those who tried. You can’t even reach an agreement with her, the best you can do is react to her changing moods.

On our last day (when I didn’t get a chance to fish) we were near the beach and I noticed that the surf was rough and the water quite choppy compared to previous days. I noticed that the weather was very much like it had been earlier in the week. There must’ve been a storm somewhere over the horizon that caused the rough water. Had I gone fishing that day I’d have needed a heavier sinker to keep my bait from being washed in. As always, the ocean set the rules, and I could’ve done nothing but react to them.