{Disclaimer: this post, sort of a stream of consciousness affair, is going to involve references to German Expressionist Theater, poke-poling theory, long dead blues musicians, ancient Celtic clan organization and my own lyrics to songs about legendary fishermen... if any part of this is problematic for you, by all means go here: (For You). Bye!}
And for those who have decided to continue... you've been warned.
Anyway...
All these years... my zine, my monkeyface record, the name of my blog--all these--and it took becoming a tour guide to actually learn how to catch eels.
I mean seriously. I'm not kidding. Here's the thing. The truth was staring me in the face the whole time. Remember the poke poling video I did way back in 2005? Dodging the waves and whatnot? It always struck me as odd that I caught an eel that day. It was a + 3.4 low tide. Feel me? Everyone knows that poke poling is a minus tide activity, right? Nobody poke poles + 3.4 low tides, and I mean nobody. Don't write me and tell me you only poke pole these tides. Not only will I call you a liar, I will challenge you to a duel. Sabikis and Hair Raisers at 30 paces. (Not sure about my Hair-raser skills but I can fling a Sabiki like the Lone Ranger).
Let me just tell you something. Forget about minus tides. Go poke pole tomorrow. I'll tell you where. E-mail me.
See, it's like this: On these tours I talk about everything.
(Don't worry I do not burn spots... other than listing the public piers, and likely areas to look for herring spawns. It frustrates the hell out of my customers I'm sure. But as yet no one knows where to go for night smelt or even surfies. I do catch a lot of eels on the city tours but my spot is under a (defunct) sewer discharge tube and few people are running back out there to get their eels. What I really do is I tell them the deal. What conditions to look for, what the regs are, species i.d., history of the fisheries, sustainability, biology, migration patterns, how to throw a cast net, health risks/benefits. It's up to them to figure out where to go).
That was a long parenthesis... even for me!
But I Digress
I've been trying not to wander here of late. But all my favorite posts are the ones that ramble on. There's a lot of folks who take my tours and then check in on my blog and have no idea that I was an underground punk rock tuba player street performer front man for a decade and a half. They also don't know about my literary pretentions (I am the Marcel Proust of fishing bloggers--and have three 400 page unpublished manuscripts poised, like Damoclese's sword, directly above my head as I write this, to prove it), the strange road my life taken: actor, tuba player, fisheries observer, art-teacher-for-juvenile-delinquints, tenor, eel champion, barroom raconteur, and as previously mentioned, Marcel Proust of fishing bloggers. So, what I'm saying is, I've been holding back somewhat of late.
But I think I'm due for a wandering one.
Where was I?
Oh right... poke-poling epiphanies. Even the great Cambodian Stan ("He's the man he's so manly he's Cambodian Stanley" -- the last song on Rube Waddell's 2nd album, "Bound For The Gates Of Hell") the man who introduced me to the concept of poke-poling, did not typically poke pole +2.5 to +4.0 low tides.
Cambodian Stan... maybe I'll link to the song... Oh bummer, no way to upload the link to Rube Waddell's classic hit track. Why, because the actual song is tagged onto another song "The Cosmic Integral" (of equal merit) so the total track is like 16 minutes long or something... let's see... maybe I'll make one of those annoying slide shows and stick it on Youtube... can't think of any other way to do it... okay here we go... (see somewhere below).
Final resting place of the Teignmouth Electron. If you do not know the story of this boat you should either read the link provided below, or download the song "The Cosmic Integral" from the link to Pandora also provided (see: Bound For The Gates Of Hell, above). FYI: the song "The Cosmic Integral," also includes "Cambodian Stan," tagged on to the end, so you get two tracks for the price of one.
OMG that took me 3 hours! So much for smelt jumping today. So much for striper fishing at Sharp Park. So much for really anything else. See the sacrifices I make! Anyway, if no one listens to this song I'm gonna be pissed. It's only 5 minutes. And I guarantee the lyrics and the weird strains of my homemade, electric slide guitar (aka: the Teignmouth Electron--named for the doomed vessel of Donald Crowhurst) will make it worth your while.
Cambodian Stan, by Mark "Finesmell" Feinthel
Again, I only offer this slideshow to a classic Rube Waddell track because I think the viewership might get a kick out of the lyrics, not because I think you need to see all the pictures of me poke poling. The line-drawing of Stanley (which resides in a frame over my desk) was penned by Mark "Finesmell" Feinthel, a very talented illustrator who used to write epic comments on this blog but seems to have disappeared sometime in the last 8 months--whereabouts unknown.
Anyway... here's the song: Cambodian Stan. The story of that rugged Cambodian gentleman who taught me how to poke pole... then, strangely, disappeared from my life forever.
{MFN Parenthetic Aside #510: My favorite lyric from the song... Yeah kinda weird quoting my self... Nevertheless, how's this for sheer brilliance:
"Watch as he expertly catches the sand crabs
In a basket of a steel that he welded himself
He could outfish Poseidon if they had them a contest
He could outfish the devil in the sewers of hell...
{Insert home made, two string, electric slide guitar break down here}
Sure his piss is bright blue and his liver is bleeding
at night time he glows and his children are blind
But he hunts and he gathers and he don't need no license
He's the the king of the bay, he's the king of his kind"}
Now where in the hell was I 3 hours ago.....?
Oh right... I'm doing these tours and I'm thinking... man it really is a shame there aren't more minus tides so i can actually do this, say, 3-4 days a week and make a living at it. And then one day I noticed that there's about two feet of California mussels and gooseneck barnacles exposed at a + 2.7 low tide, and I'm thinking, hell, why not do a tour? So I go ahead and book an intertidal tour on a + 2.8 low tide. And everyone's standing around at the end, as I discuss poke poling theory (this is the advanced tour, heh heh) and just for Schlitz and giggles I go ahead and start poke poling under a rock at the top of the low tide line (and this is two hours after the bottom of a +2.8--everybody following me?). Not because I'm thinking there's gonna be anything under it, but because i'm trying to show my customers how it's supposed to look. And then...
Bam.
Not one eel. Not two. Not three. Six. Six eels, all honkers, in, get this: 14 minutes. With 17 people watching. Forget about my friggin state record! Six eels in 14 minutes... in front of a crowd of paying customers... now that's impressive. (Yeah, I know what yer thinking. No, it wasn't the same fish 6 times).
{MFN Parenthetic Aside #511--Mel Ott's number--It's like this, I may not really have a handle on striped bass. My "high sticking" rockfish landing technique demonstrated in the recent video may point to a certain lack of... proper training. My most well known video features me reeling an ancient baitcaster backwards... all this is true and may point to the fact that I have serious holes in my game. I would never deny this. I've said it before. I'm better at writing about fishing than I am at fishing. But if there is one thing I am at least reasonably confident of, it is my ability to capture the eel. In this, I hope I may be so bold as to suggest, I may even excel.
The worst swing in the history of baseball somehow miraculously produced a .305 lifetime batting average and 511 homeruns. The 220 foot right field fence at the Polo Grounds didn't hurt. But still. Not bad for a guy with a softball swing.
And yet... I didn't really know this about the higher-low tides. Which only serves to remind me to check in with myself, whenever I start to think I'm so friggin smart.
It's funny I was on the beach the other night and I ran into this old striper guy. He was dragging a 20 pound striper up the beach in front of 30 other guys who had nothing to show for five consecutive days of plugging. And the funny thing was, this same old man had done the same thing the two previous evenings. Here we are day 3. Here he comes. Dragging another striper up the beach. Now listen. After the third night in a row of this the other guys were just about ready to drop to their knees and make a pledge of fielty. Isn't that how clans used to be formed? The guy steps out onto the field of battle and wipes out 16 enemy combatants with three strokes of his broad sword, turns around and what do you know? He's got himself a posse, a harem, 17 dukedoms, and a little gold crown.
The title of this 19th century painting is: "Brennus And His Share Of The Spoils." Now just imagine what this guy coulda done with a Hair-raiser on Ocean Beach. Everybody knows the story of Brennus right? I've mentioned him before... anyway, if you're interested go here: Vae Victus.
It was like this with the old man on the beach the other night in the parking lot as he dropped another fish into the cooler. Only thing is, this old man doesn't give a shit whether or not he's impressing anyone. I said to him, "Showing everybody how it's done, eh Joe?" He turns, gives me the ol' who's-this-fool-talking-nonsense-at-me look, nods and says: "I ain't showin nobody nothin." Slams the trunk and drives away.
George Jones - The Grand Tour by rappa1
Just had one of those Frank Sinatra-George Jones ("... as you leave you'll see the nursery, oh she left me without mercy! Taking nothing but our baby and my heart" is a deeply deeply brilliant example of American folk poetry, BTW)--Louis Jordan--Steeler's Wheel--Haitian Meringue--Captain Beefheart--Little Walter--Ekhart Tolle-and now, drum roll please, Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn-on-my-i-tunes moments.
Can someone please tell me where I was?
Oh right. 14 eels in 6 minutes... or rather... 6 in 14. Right. Unreals yo. All these years I had this image of monkeyface eels hunkering down under rocks, lying low at the minus tide line... and what they're really doing is moving in and out with the tide, foraging sea lettuce, turkish towel and other algaes as high as they can get 'em and as low. Yes, actually, lotsa turkish towel in post-fillet stomach content analyses of late.
Little Walter seen here before a life in the blues, and after.
{Back to the parenthetic ((and paripatetic)) moment.... Little Walter is to the blues what the butterfly (Papillion) is to the human spirit in confinement. Little Walter on Back Track is Sir Gawain and the Green Friggin Knight, yo. Forget about Brennus. I'll sign on to the Marion Walter Jacobs posse! I mean talk about telling stories with your instrument. Little Walter on that song might as well be Homer. Did they tap their feet to Homer?
Kind of funny what happens when you do a google image search for "Homer." I'll tell you what, the blind poet ain't the first guy who comes up.
Sure they did.
Here check this out for some truly unbelievable harmonicaship. Not so much for fanciness, but tone and control and storytelling:
Little Walter on Back Track is only superceded by Little Walter on Everything' s Gonna Be Alright, which is only surpassed by Little Walter on Worried Life... Please, listen to the out takes at the beginning of this track (Worried Life). Walter talking to Leonard Chess. "I don't mean to kill nobody, shit!"
So sad. They found Little Walter's body in a crumpled heap. Having been beaten to death the previous year, when the blood clot time-bomb first formed in the imprint left by some bad ass's knuckles, (or was it his boot heel?) cementing the deal in the hard darkness of a south chicago night. How do we go on without our Little Walters?
We fish I guess.
Or go over to the worship of angry deities like Baal, Tlaloc and Yaweh (Oh my!)
Bertolt Brecht, writer of Baal, in a truly awesome jacket.
Baal is a word that's fun to write and fun to say. (Unless of course you're a Hebrew tribesman living in the Fertile Crescent in 2,000 BC). It was also a very interesting play as I remember. Bertolt Brecht's first I think. Kind of a spin off of Buchner's Woyczeck.
(Yikes, am I off track or what?)
Listen, while I'm on the subject, all you need to know about Baal is this: anytime anyone produces this play, you can rest assured, they are 19 years old. Even if official identification cards and facial hair indcate they're 54. They're not, they're 19. I did this play at the age of 18. The director was a young 22. The other actors were all young and sexy. We did this at an underground acting class in the village in 1987. 6 people came to the performance. I think they wandered in off the street for a warmer place to sit. One of them, it was rumored, was a theatrical agent, scouring the riverbed for possible nuggets of pure ore. The performance ended abruptly halfway through when a pipe burst and flooded the hallway outside our door with floating turds.
Baal, looking rather harmless.
Where was I... right. 6 night smelt in 14 minutes is a terrible score. But 6 eels in 14 minutes and you're golden. Aye, there's the rub!
I mean, it was ridiculous... there were so many. And the tide so friggin' high. And the groundwork for this whole minus tide thing set by men who were supposedly so much more knowledgeable than I. But no. As it turns out... poke poling ain't a minus tide thing at all. In fact... any tide will do.
I guess that's what I've been trying to say. Kind of an epiphany when something so obvious makes itself so abundantly clear. Strange that it took this long for me to get to it.
All right, whoever made it this far gets a free beer on me next time we're together.
Anyway... time to go do something with what's left of this particular Woden's day.
From deep in the fecund wonderland of my eel obsessed brain, this is Lombard of the Intertidal, rawking to Little Walter... digging the positive tide, and all the possibilities it now offers, and, at last, signing out!
"Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly" -- I try to keep that in all of my pursuits. Unfortunately I'm not at the rule-breaking stage with fishing :)
Posted by: Ryan | 07/13/2011 at 10:44 PM
Kirk, you are now, and always have been, and always shall be, one of my heroes. Fantastic post.
...
I never did get to hear you play Mawson's Will live.
Posted by: Dan | 07/14/2011 at 12:45 AM
Call me a liar Mr MFE, but I have honestly poked out eels at any and all tides, high and low, big and small. As a naive young(er) fisherman I used to think lots of water was required to poke for rock dwellers. I only started favouring low tides because I eventually discovered they meant I could simply stroll across the sandy flats to my favourite jetty spot rather than hop along miles of guano-encrusted boulders.
I cannot accept your hair-raiser challenge, as I have the upper body strength of a sparrow and will thus be humiliated.
I too enjoy the rambles. More!
Posted by: Northern Boy | 07/14/2011 at 01:25 AM
Kirk, fantastic post! It's been a while since you have had the time (or inspiration?) to sit down and compose something like this for us, and I'm glad you did! Perhaps I'll try poking regardless of the tide on one of my next trips out to the San Mateo coastline (although I've never actually poked before so it will be a first for me in more ways than one!).
Posted by: Scott Parker | 07/14/2011 at 08:41 AM
Ramblin' posts are the best.
There's something about Monkeyface Eels I've wondered about for awhile now: If they are vegetarians, why do they go for the squid? I wonder if they'd bite a bare hook, or one tied with green yarn?
Posted by: Eric B | 07/14/2011 at 12:02 PM
Superlative post- the art, the music (cambodian Stan! Little Walter!), the history, the fishing... what more could one ask for? Keep up the great work!
Posted by: Jessica | 07/15/2011 at 10:26 AM