I always have difficulty with the modern world and it's casual wealth draped across the water - out for a few hours fishing in a boating outfit that costs more than I paid for my old vacation farm house in Cape Breton - and if we go back about 65 or 70 years ago, this would have been my father in a battered old rowboat that he salvaged from the burn pile somewhere and refurbished with gathered lumber and pints of left-over paints from some house painting job, and the only actual outlay of money would have been one of the better reels of the day along with some of the better fishing line. And in that old boat in sun or rain, wind or calm, he would row in steady cadence for some miles along the river to the proper spots along the channel that was lined with acres of water grass in which fish in great profusion lived and prospered. I doubt if any line fisherman ever caught more fish than he - one day in particular he caught 44 fish all over four pounds, large mouth bass and pike (possibly the E
sox lucius also called Northern Pike) and all of which he rowed to 'The Wharf' and sold for store food money (although we never were without fresh fish for breakfast and any other meal as the meat dish of the week). But this was in the halcyon days of clean water, and only small boats fishing commercially in the seemingly endless bounty of the bay (Chesapeake) and the tributary rivers and all with thriving endless acres of water grass - but this was before the behemoth of the power boating industry that had this mighty water system systematically cleared of grass that tangled the propellers of both the working boats and the almighty power boats. Once cleared the water was never clear again - no longer could one look over the side and see the fish and bottom life in as much as fifteen feet of water. But progress in inevitable it seems, so that today we use sonar to show us what swims beneath even though the muddy water is as opaque as our minds.
