Deep Pond, Falmouth

July 5, 1992
Deep Pond, Falmouth MA (Sam Turner Rd.)
Difficult access. Trout rising 10:30am. Large bass on west shore. Hits – no fish taken. Good pond. Try in future fishing deep. Not much cover, a few docks, should be fished early morning.

This was the last day fishing the geological kettle ponds. One line of this entry jumps out at me. “Hits – no fish taken. Good pond.” Only would a fisherman say that a pond is good where he didn’t catch any fish. In the mind of a fisherman, seeing or feeling evidence of a fish is the determining factor if a body of water is good or bad. A pond that yields only hits provides a challenge for the future and some assurance that fish can be caught there. This means this pond is tough. It requires a smart fisherman. Simple logic – if you go back there and conquer the fish, you are officially smarter.

Herein lies the one of the basic tenets of fishing – you will fail more often than you succeed. This is built into fishing. In tennis, you will generally hit the ball over the net in bounds more often than not. In baseball, even a mediocre player will get a hit 20 percent of the time. In golf, you may not get a par on every hole but at least you hit the ball on every swing (or almost every swing).

Fishing is built on the premise of failing most of the time. All the apparatus in fishing is designed with this in mind. The reel allows you to retrieve your failed cast, lures were created to repeatedly allow the fisherman to present his bait over and over with more efficiency in the realm of failure. Every statistic I’ve ever seen about sport fishing leads the reader to the conclusion that it is the least efficient sport known to man.

Yet this colossal ratio of failure to success seems to be fishings greatest attraction. Maybe it is the one sport where being a failure is not laughed at. Even the worst fishermen are viewed as kind and gentle souls even if they are a bit dunderheaded.

Another comment in the journal entry notes that we got there “too late.” This is one of the fisherman’s greatest of all excuses to justify failure. Had we only been their an hour earlier…rarely do people say “you should come an hour later” – except in the South – where coming an hour later means that the chef/mechanic/accountant/plumber/roofer/fry cook/etc will have returned from their morning of fishing will be there to serve you in “about an hour.” There are no half-hours south of the Mason Dixon line. Often times you will be instructed to “come back in a couple of hours” – which translates to “take it easy Yankee, go sit in your car, roll down the window, buy a Dr. Pepper, smoke a cigarette and observe the birds on the telephone wire for a spell.” The South after all has a certain expertise in dealing with failure.

One of my friend’s fathers once told me a story about a guy he worked with that was from the heart of Old Virginia. After enduring years and years of stories about Dixie, the Civil War and the finer points of Robert E. Lee’s battle tactics, he finally turned to his co-worker and said “You know, in New Jersey sometimes we go a whole six months without even mentioning the Civil War.” Of course he was immediately corrected – “You mean the war between the states” he said, maintaining that most endearing quality of the Southerner, adherence to the romance of noble failure.