Article by Capt. Mark Sampson
It’s said that one of the greatest assets an angler can have is patience, and as fishermen we know this to be true. If you can’t sit still long enough to wait for a fish to come along and bite your worm, maybe you’d better trade your fishing rod in for a golf club, hockey stick or something else that doesn’t require waiting and waiting and waiting for something to happen, all the while knowing that it might not. As fishermen we know that the outcome is very often not going to be what we wish for, but we always hold out hope that this will be the day we catch the “big one” or happen upon a mother-load of fish, the likes of which most anglers can only dream about. Even on the slowest of days we know that at any time we might just be one bite away from the catch of a lifetime!
We were taught as children that “patience is a virtue.” But, just like everything else that “grown-ups” tried to hammer into our brains back then, that lesson just doesn’t seem to settle into everyone’s gray matter at the same depth. Patience may be a virtue but it’s clearly not one that all of us have enough of. Take Chuck for instance; Chuck (and that’s not really his name) had what was his “3rd annual” trip with us a few weeks ago. The last couple of years Chuck was, I guess, just living right because it was no sooner had we stopped the boat and got our lines in the water before we were catching fish. It was the kind of fishing that’s really not healthy for a newbie fisherman to experience because it spoils them for life – stop the boat and just solid pull on fish until your arms are simply too tired to work any more, you’re out of bait or it’s time to go home. After a couple of trips like that, Chuck was just as spoiled as spoiled can be and I knew going into our last trip that I was in trouble no matter what happened because if we had another banner trip, Chuck would probably just quite literally “explode” and then I’d have to explain to his wife and kids why I was only able to bring pieces of Chuck back to the dock in a couple five-gallon buckets. I figured the only good that could come out of all that would be that it might be learning experience for the kids that “too much of a good thing really can hurt”!
I knew that the flip side of fishing with Chuck on that third trip would be that if we didn’t have a big catch he’d be disappointed and wonder why we weren’t doing as well as before. Other than the two trips before, Chuck had no prior fishing experience, so all he knew about fishing was what he had done with us on those two prior outings and how do you live up to that? As it turns out you don’t, or at least we didn’t. We fished and fished without a bite, all the while fielding questions from Chuck. “Are we in the right spot? Is the bait not fresh? Should we let the lines out farther? Can you call someone on the radio and find out where the fish are? “Patience” did not board the boat that day!
It was only a half-day trip, so we were limited on time and options. I was, therefore, inclined to stay put and wait. After all, we had been doing quite well at that spot all week and I just knew that at any moment the tide would change, baitfish would start moving or any of a gazzilion other things could happen beneath the waves that would turn our quarry into eating machines. But waiting it out took patience and that was a lesson that Chuck apparently didn’t pay attention to as a kid, and so there we were, him wanting something to happen NOW and me thinking the best course of action would be to just stick it out and see what comes along.
I’m not going to say that Chuck “demanded” that we make a move to a “better” spot but he kept asking, “Is there any other place where we might be able to catch more fish?” Even though I kept telling him, “Not that I’m aware of, otherwise we’d be there by now” he just wouldn’t let the thought go that maybe we should be somewhere else. So as much as I didn’t want to do it, I was compelled to make what some of us in the charter boat business call a “confidence move” which means that, for no reason other than to appease impatient anglers, we move from one fishing spot to another, even though we know darn-well that the best course of action would be to stay right were we were.
So we pulled in the lines, hoisted our anchor and headed off to another place where I hoped we could get on some fish right away. With only so much time left in our half-day trip, and our course to spot number-two taking us farther out, I wasn’t at all happy with making a move that would eat up even more fishing time and require that we start a whole new chum line from scratch. From my own experience I just knew we should have stayed at the first place, and as we got underway it really started to irk me that I allowed my own intuition to be swayed by someone else’s impatience, and I was going to end up paying for it by burning extra fuel and probably catching no more fish. But the anchor was up, we were running, and there was no turning back from my decision - well sort of.
A lot of things go through a captain’s mind when he’s trying to figure out the best course of action to take to solve a dilemma like the one I found myself in that day. In this case, (and take this as a confession if you wish) the course I decided to take was one that had me running in a big wide circle that ended up right back were we started from. As my buddy Chuck snoozed, and the rest of the crew wolfed sandwiches, I just kept adding 5-degrees at a time to my compass heading until we had done a complete 360 and arrived at our new/old spot. As far as I was concerned “we made our move” and low-and-behold ten minutes after dropping anchor we were hooked-up!
We only had an hour left to fish but in that time we caught enough that the day could definitely be called a success by all concerned and good old Chuck was happy as a clam. If only to clear my conscious I was inclined to tell Chuck that we went back to the same spot, I know he wouldn’t have minded because we caught fish. Maybe it would even have made me look like a better fisherman if I told him that my first intuitions were correct and actually paid-off. But when we got back to the dock Chuck was already bragging to his friends that it was a good thing he was able to talk the captain into moving to a better spot otherwise we probably wouldn’t have caught anything, so I thought that maybe I should just be “patient” and let the rest of the day play out on its own.
Captain Mark Sampson is an outdoor writer and captain of the charter boat “Fish Finder”, docked at the Ocean City Fishing Center.
