Memoirs - Fishing Days
(preliminary)
I was a fisherman most of my early days and through most of my adult life on the East Coast.
It got into my blood because of the summer place at Kauneonga Lake I went to till I was 18. My uncle Jean Pomerantz was a fisherman, but I think I got into it because we were near and spent so much time on and at the lake. Also a kid in one of the other bungalows liked to fish too, so we were a pair of boys going fishing a lot.
In the section entitled Kauneonga Days you can read about some of my teen age summer fishing adventures. I think I may have also described my trips with uncle Jean and then later with my buddy Jerry on Black Lake. In fact except for a small beach for a few locals, Black Lake was exclusively a "fishing lake."
Later, in Boston a neighbor in my building and I would rent small skiffs and go out into Boston Harbor for flounders. We caught a lot but it is questionable that we should have eaten them. Well, I am still alive so I guess they were not that badly polluted. I also bought some pretty fancy ocean casting tackle, thinking I would become a big time surf fisherman. Turned out the rod was so big (11 feet) and the lures so heavy, I could not handle it. I was barely strong enough to swing it! Needless to say I never caught anything with it but I still have it (the 11 foot rod).
My friend and I also occasionally went out on party boats out of Boston or nearby New Hampshire. We caught mackerel and one time (by accident) I caught a 40 pound cod fish.
Another time, near Monhegan Island off the Maine coast we caught (along with a bunch of big eating fish), two sharks - one was almost 8 feet long. Unfortunately the fishing boat captains killed any sharks. They assumed that sharks ate the fish we were trying to catch for dinner. No one ate ate the sharks, they just trashed them.