Beer Cans and Paper Plates

By John and Irene Hurwitz

As fishermen, we spend an inordinate amount of time running from one reported bite to the next. More often than not, when we get to the "hot bite", people are saying, "you should have been here yesterday". Of course you already knew this because as you were setting the gear, you couldn't help notice an occasional beer can followed shortly by a floating paper plate. Its the most effective way I know of to be certain that you're too late.

For the record, this doesn't happen today like it did in the 70's and 80's. Fishermen are now the most ecologically minded people on the sea, and the beer cans, bait trays, and paper plates have been replaced by visual silence. Nothing to tell you your too late.

Another weapon in our arsenal has disappeared. The radio direction finder or rdf. There was a time when I wouldn't be out there without one. Now with the advent of cell phones, the only ones talking on the radio are either sports fishermen or old retired guys (like me and Irene) who have boats with names like "Muskrat", "Eightball", and "Polywog", and it goes something like this. "Pick me up Muskrat, this is the eightball calling", "Yeah!!, I got you Virgil, whats up?" How are ya doin Orville, ya got anything yet"? Yeah, we got one in the box Virgil, and two that we never saw. They bit good, rattled the poles, but we never saw them again.

This is not a conversation you want to have dialed into your rdf unless you're lonely and have been out there too long. Get a dog, its easier!!

When radios were king, (a play on words, we used the king radio to fool everybody) it got so bad that if you said anything about fish on the air, you could almost feel the rdf beams bouncing off your boat. To combat this phenom, we devised codes to throw them off the scent. In fact, we devised several codes to aid us with the war on fish terrorists.

Our most successful code looked like a football pool at the local tavern. On the top row of the sheet we put words in columns. Words like "really", "very", "awfully" and so on. On the left side of the sheet, we put in words like, "scratchy", "slow", "poor", "bad", and so on.

When we were talking with each other on the vhf or sideband, we would say things like "Yeah keith, its been very slow", and Keith would look along the top of the paper to find "very", and then follow it down to "slow", and in that intersecting box there would be a number like 50+. Meaning of course that we were simply lying, and by saying the phrase "Very Slow", we were telling our partner we had 50+ salmon.

For Albacore, we used the same code with bigger numbers, and you had to say the phrase twice for it to be genuine. Don't ask me why, thats just the way it was. So the fleet became cryptogophers trying to break the codes. We had a color code as well, and it was another of those that you had to mention the color twice for it to be believed.

It was something like this. "Pick me up Keith?", "Yeah, I got ya John, how it going?" Not much to report, gee, this water is a light green out here, I don't usually catch anything in this color of green water, how about you? Again, he look on the paper and sees that the mention of green is a number say from 20-30 fish.

It was exciting, and sometimes you would forget and not mention the color twice. If that happened, you had to devise a new lie to relay the same message. Some of the revisions were pretty funny sounding. "Pick me up Keith?" "Yeah, I got ya, whats up?" I meant to tell you that the green hoochies that chuck sold us are not working for me." "As a matter of fact, I don't even like using green, I don't know why I let him talk us into buying these."

	very	pretty	real	quite
slow	20+	30+	40+	50+
poor	60	70	80	90+
scratchy	100	125	150	175
boring	200	225	250	we're rich

make up your own.....

I think fishing was more fun in those days...