The Bay, The Channel, and The Fish

There was a time, prior to 1973, when there was a naval air station at Quonset Point, Rhode Island. The Navy stationed two Essex Class aircraft carriers there, which meant there was a deep water channel running from just east of Brenton Tower at the mouth of the East Passage to Narragansett Bay, all the way in to the carrier piers at the air station. The station is gone, and the two carriers, the Intrepid and the Essex, are long gone to scrap.

Naturally, this channel was a prominent feature on the navigational charts of the lower bay. In the early seventies recording fathometers became available to the general boating public at reasonable prices, and as you steamed your boat over this channel, it would appear on the recorded trace as a ditch with sides cut at near right angles.

Two things happened almost simultaneously around ‘73. First, Dad shifted from open ocean fishing to working Narragansett Bay. Second, the two major Rhode Island municipal sewerage treatment plants that had functioned improperly for so many years were upgraded significantly, thanks to a federal lawsuit. The second item was critical. In the course of a single year the menhaden, a small fish that held a critical link in the food chain of two important salt water game fishes, returned to Narragansett Bay in massive numbers. With the menhaden came their predators.

Menhaden swim in huge, tight schools, where bluefish and stripped bass feed on them. As the larger fish tear into the schools of menhaden, the schools move toward the surface of the sea in an attempt to escape their predators. In their panic, the menhaden don’t realize they are running out of water as some of them leap out into the air before falling back into the sea. This causes a ‘boiling’ effect on the surface as the (most often) bluefish feed on the smaller fish. Blues are voracious feeders, with four rows of teeth.

If Dad and I were out on the Bay and spotted the menhaden ‘boiling’ we would make a bee line for the area, taking care to stand off from the ‘boiling’ spot itself. If you cruised your boat right through it, you would drive the menhaden school under and disperse the fish.

We would lie to about ten yards off the school, casting our spinning rods or fly rods into that feeding frenzy. With luck we would entice one or more large bluefish that were feeding on the menhaden to take our lures. Blues are great fighters. A twenty pound blue will give you as good a fight as a forty pound stripper. The idea was to give the feeding frenzy a wide berth; sometimes it broke up on its own.

But back to the carrier channel. The really big blues and strippers didn’t come to the surface much except at night. To get them you put a line deep, just down to the edge of the carrier channel, using lead or wire line. Dad was a master of this. He would run the boat at about two to three knots, trolling those lines just right, back and forth over the edge of the carrier channel. He’d watch the fathometer to ensure the lures were floating back and forth along the edge, and get us into plenty of big blues. That wasn’t as exciting as casting into an acre of boiling menhaden, but it got you into big fish that took quite a while to bring to the stern of the boat. It was exciting to see that dim gray form come into view from deep in the water as the details of an eighteen pound bluefish came into focus, and you tried like heck to not lose her in the last few moments before Dad set the gaff.

Long after Dad could no longer go out on the water we would sit and talk about those days with a special fondness. When dementia had robbed him of so much, it never robbed him of those memories. During the last full day of his life, when he was confined to a hospital bed, he motioned me close, and in a soft voice we talked about those trips on Narragansett Bay, about the different lures, and how they were effective in different circumstances. He even brought up the fact that the flasher on that fathomer wasn’t much good, so it was a damned good thing that we had the paper trace.

After Dad died, I took one of his best salt water reels, a Penn Mariner, that I had cleaned up and lubed so that it was ready to go, and sent it to my son. He is an avid collector of all things family, and he treasures it. It’s not just a relic. The same reel is coveted by fishermen on the Alaskan coast. I know he’ll treat it right, and he has my stories about fishing with Dad.