Bourne, Fishing And Stan Gibbs

Bourne is a nautical town. We are where the state decided to put her Maritime Academy. We're the first clam shacks and fish huts you see when entering Cape Cod. We're named after a guy who was named after a harbor... in fact, the harbor may actually be named for him, I've got to Google that some time.

Not only are we surrounded by water, we're divided by water. You can't go from Sagamore to Pocasset without dealing with that Canal. However, Bourne residents love their little man-made ocean river, even if it sort of curses us with gridlock every weekend.

One of the reasons we love our Canal is that it has some superb fishing. It is essentially a river between Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod Bay, and all sorts of beasts (fish, whales, squids, sharks, tunas, dolphins, seals, and even, as far as we can tell, at least one bear) swim through it. You can make a case that, once accessibility is factored in, the Cape Cod Canal is the best surfcasting spot in Massachusetts.

If you had the right tools and the necessary will, you could fish a LNG tanker out of that Canal. It would require Herculean strength and Napoleonesque game-planning... but if it could be done, the Cape Cod Canal is where you could be doing it it. It is also the only place that a particularly deft surfcaster could snatch the cap off of a millionaire from 100 yards away as he piloted his Sea Limo through the Canal. You actually get a bench along the Canal named after you if you do that, it's in the small print of the Town Charter.

And if anybody could have pulled that off, it would have been Stan Gibbs, but we'll get to him in a second.

Those fish have filled many a tummy over the years, as the locals soon figured out that the Canal was essentially a Fish Funnel that could be tapped again and again and again. Her reputation grew, and it is now a Grade A surfcasting spot. 

A celebration of that Canal would be very problematic without Fishing placed up in the front row. After that, Natural Beauty and Ease Of Transporting Goods, the Canal sort of becomes a Catastrophic Traffic Issue... and, in an emergency of the right sort, a veritable Line Of Death.

But enough of that talk. We're talking about fishing today, and we're celebrating the Sea Dog, the surfcaster, the angler, the old salt... The Fisherman. 

A state stands in Buzzards Bay.. It honors the fisherman, and it has a very clever Rembrandt/Hemingway sort of title... The Fisherman.

The statue was funded via donations from private citizens (mainly the Stan Gibbs Fisherman’s Classic Fishing Tournament people), and it stands 10 feet tall. It was made by Hyannis sculptor David Lewis, and was bronzed in Arizona. It is placed near Buzzards Bay Park, by the railroad bridge. It will be surrounded by roses, fountain grass, and will even have a compass rose. As near as I can tell, the statue will be "aimed" at Sagamore.

The text reads:“The Fisherman. A tribute to past, present and future striped bass fishermen of the great Cape Cod Canal, inspired by local fishing legend Stan Gibbs." It cost $80K.

The statue depicts Stan Gibbs, and a famous photograph of Gibbs served as the model for it. I'm not the one to make the call on whether Gibbs was the best fisherman ever on Cape Cod and the Islands (I'm pretty sure we are where Quint and Captain Ahab are from, at least Movie Quint), but he certainly owned the Canal.

Gibbs was born in Easton, but the sea drew him to Sagamore. He was a giant man, but also a creative man. He became world-famous for the fishing lures he created, many of which (Polaris Popper, Casting Swimmer, Pencil Popper, Needlefish, and Darter) are still being copied and mass-produced by whatever companies make fishing stuff. His family (I think) still runs the business he created out of his love of fishing, Gibbs' Lures.

Check the Salt Water Fishing Lures Collection Club convention, at the Canal Room of the Trowbridge Tavern in Bourne.... just off the Bourne Rotary. It's going on today.

He also pioneered the use of numbered poles to mark his fishing spot. To this day, Canal anglers will say "254 was on last night" and so forth. I was completely unaware of this before I went out the other day and started bothering local fisherman.

Bothering the local anglers also provided the meat of this Story Sandwich... his legendary accomplishments. All legends need mythology, and Stan Gibbs has some amazing stories floating around about his skills. The possibility that locals were teasing a girl with ridiculous fishing stories can't be disregarded. I welcomed that, to be honest. Stan's dead, by the way, so he wasn't feeding me this stuff himself to sell lures. Primary sources are excellent and essential for real history, but they only get in the way of Legend Building. 

Here is what I've heard about Stan Gibbs, and mind you that I wasn't out collecting stories that long:

- The state catch limit on stripers is known as the Stan Gibbs Rule.

- Stan's record for Speediest Catch was 17 seconds, and that included beaching it.

- At least 20 people told me that Stan could cast completely across the Canal if someone put a C Note down on him not being able to do so.

- Stan knew the Canal's bottom well enough that he had names for certain troublesome spots.

- Stan not only fished during Hurricane Bob, he executed a 120 yard cast into the teeth of the wind. When he was casting with the wind at his back, he was somehow catching deep-sea fish.

- On a dare, Stan could snap-cast and hook a fish like an arrow shot if he had a clear visual and it wasn't windy. It required a special spear-lure that Stan refused to produce commercially.

- Stan could fish holding poles in each hand, and often did so just before Good Fridays during the Depression if the Salvation Army was planning a big supper. See "catch limits," above.

- Not only did Stan never tangle his line when fishing near others, but he could disentangle crossed lines with what I will describe as the same hand motion you use when winding up to shoot some dice.

- Stan didn't catch and release every fish in the Canal once just to intimidate them, but he liked to propagate that rumor once he started selling lures. He did it skillfully, of course. "Customers are just another fish, dear...."

- Stan was fishing for bait, caught some, and started reeling it in. A schooly striper than struck the hooked herring, in the process impaling itself on the hook. Most fisherman would have reeled that score in, but Stan- who had done it 20 or 30 times before- waited and waited... and a bluefish attacked the striper. Stan then reeled them all in, and had them for supper.

- The hat-off-a-millionaire story was actually told to me about Gibbs, but more in a "he casted so well that he could have..." manner than as something he actually did. They do say that he had a collection of Mister Howell-style hats in his shed that was completely out of context in comparison to his other trophies, but that he never ever ever answered questions about them.

- The shark you see in the New England Aquarium was caught by Stan, on shore, with a holiday ham as bait. He had a friendly boat haul his bait out a half mile, and Stan handled the rest.

- When Stan tired of eating fish, he would sneak up near The Seafood Shanty or wherever and surfcast a cheeseburger off of the plate of a tourist. He did it enough that the various clam shacks would comp meals if this was claimed by a customer, no questions asked.

- A guy accidentally dropped his keys into the Canal while swimming in from a boat. He had only a rough estimate of where they fell into the water, and the current was strong. Local kids immediately fetched Stan Gibbs. He weighted down a treble hook, asked the unfortunate soul about 3 where/what/how far questions, and then fished his keys out of the Canal on anywhere (I heard this story a few times) between 1 and 20 casts.

- Stan once hooked a Mako Shark in the Canal, fought it for 9 hours, brought it to the rocks, slapped it in the face, and let it go."Tell the others my name..." he was rumored to have whispered to it. This act- done the summer after a fatal shark attack in Buzzards Bay- is credited by some with the lack of shark attacks on humans in this area since. I think the shark who bit the guy off of Truro a few years ago was European, and he fled town the instant he heard that this was Gibbs Country.

- "Stan" is translatable to "Satan" in Striperese.

- The first thing you actually learn as a fish when you join one of those schools is to Not F*** With Stan Gibbs. The second thing you learn is "Swimming."

- I won't say with any certainty that touching the Fisherman statue before you go fishing brings you good luck when you're fishing, but I will say that it certainly can't hurt your chances. I was raised by Catholics, and thus have a very keen understanding of superstition and so forth. I want dibs on that if people start doing it.