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.

Bourne On The 4th Of July Retrospective

Nothing says "Happy July 4th" better than donning an Uncle Sam suit and walking down Main Street waving Old Glory.

The Cape Cod Whale Trail represented hard on the streets of the Bay.

You get a lot of music at the Bourne On The 4th Of July parade, but it tends to be like a minute of a song from 10 different bands.

No, they weren't all playing the same song, which- to be fair- would be quite a feat.

Why even own a hot car if you aren't going to crawl down Main Street in it during a parade while the suckers are steady hatin,' wishing they had your ride? It's like the old movie said... "You can't get laid IN that car.... but you get laid."

Not only did Bourne have a parade, we had an across-the-bay view of the Onset fireworks... without the Onset. We watched from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

The Bourne FD, steady rollin'....

The Boy Scouts and the Cub Scouts were handing out candy to parade viewers. Be Prepared... to give me some candy. I went home with a ton, and I'm 46. It's for my kid.... honest!

I kind of forget, but I think this is the Episcopal Church bear.

Terrorists rarely mess with July 4th parades, because July 4th parades often have the Armed Forces in them.

If your parade doesn't have Kilt People, your parade is wiggedy-wiggedy whack.

Any and every time I go to the park, I always check in with Stan Gibbs. Once I do, the rest of my time along the Canal will go off without incident.

Once the muay-thai people see you taking their picture, you want to use it, and make no jokes while using it.

Besides, if you're nice, Batman has martial artists give you candy. Note the still-life effect on the kid's throwing hand. He was throwing them like shuriken, with 100% accuracy. Nice shot, Jessica...

The DPW trots out the big pieces for the parade.

Everyone's favorite float, the Pirate Ship. The ship has cannon which can actually be fired. Keep in mind, explosions where people are lining the streets bring out screams of "Holy Tsarnaev!"

I usually only get this view of a sirens-on police truck when I am hiding under a car after a short pursuit.

The Canal Fest was also a big hit, making some money for the National Marine Life Center. There were lots of fun rides for the kids.

We now pause for a word from our sponsors...

See you next July 4th!

Making The World A Better Place: Deep-Sea Surfcasting Methods

Duxbury Beach, MA

I'm not really going to make any drastic changes to the world. I'm not a charismatic politician, I'm not a hero like a cop or an EMT, and- pertaining to today's column- I have almost zero skills as an inventor.

I say "almost zero" because I do have an active imagination. Imagination is an important part of inventing, but there are other skills involved in the invention process that I lack, perhaps even aggressively so. I'm sure that plenty of guys thought that it would be nice to build a flying machine, but it was a task left undone before the Wright Brothers came along. I'm sort of in a group with the do-nothing guys.

I do have a few ideas that I wouldn't mind sharing out, in hopes that someone a bit more handy than I am can solve the little problems inherent in the design process. I'd have no problem taking zero credit and seeing zero dollars, if only I could see my beloved ideas brought to life by a better craftsman than myself.

I grew up on Duxbury Beach. Those of you who are familiar with Duxbury Beach know that there is some good surfcasting to be done there. You can pluck a striper or a bluefish out of the ocean while standing on the beach. I actually caught one from INSIDE my house once. It rules.

However, Duxbury Beach is long, flat and it takes a while to get to the deep water. That's not a problem if you have a boat, you just park it somewhere with 45 feet of water under you and see what the ocean has to offer. If you don't have a boat, you can only work the shallows, even if you are an awesome caster.

It's only a matter of time before a fisherman on shore starts to wonder what goodies could be had if he or she could land a cast wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy the hell offshore. I'm not a real fisherman, not even close to one... but I do love these ideas, and I'd like to float them down the line to a more crafty angler.

Before I start to invent stuff to aid this process, let's find out if it is even worth getting a cast a few hundred yards offshore. There are several factors to consider.

First, your average spool of fishing line is, oh, 300 yards or so. That's further than any human can cast, to my knowledge. Maybe Stan Gibbs could cast further than that, but he's fishing with Jesus now.

300 yards is a lot of friggin' fishing line. Look at a NFL game. That field is 100 yards. 300 yards is plenty of room for potential line snags, caught-on-the-bottoms, and some guy on a jet-ski slicing your line. In that light, it may be better to fish 50 yards offshore.

All of that reeling back and forth also trolls your line through a lot of seaweed. Your 20 pound test won't hold up if you need to tow 50 pounds of seaweed. In New England, you can also reel in lobster pots, which is an offense that I think a lobsterman can shoot you for.

Littering is something to consider. My surfcasting balloon idea may seem like harmless fun, until a duck gets caught in the balloon or whatever and dies. I had similar problems when experimenting with my Empty Six Pack Rings fishing gear.

Deep-sea surfcasting also lines you up for an ass-kicking, as you will be putting a lot of line into the water that might tangle up with that of other fishermen. Inventors might appreciate your deep-sea surfcaster innovations, but a serious fisherman won't be so forgiving if you keep messing up his line. I'm using Duxbury Beach as an example because you can get a lot of empty beach to yourself.

Remember that every cast is an adventure in Cape Cod Bay. You may even snag a Beast. However, you may also go through some ridiculous extremes to get your line out 400 yards offshore, only to have a crab steal your bait or even get your hook caught on the Lusitania. There are 1000 shipwrecks off of just itty-bitty Truro and Wellfleet.

Also, should you catch a fish, you may be in for a 7 hour fight to beach a schoolie fish that you should have to throw back unless you're really hungry and no one official is looking. If you get too much line out there, you may have a fight that runs from Duxbury to Scituate to Plymouth and back to Duxbury. There is a ratio between how long you fight the fish and how big that fish you beach is, and if you are on the wrong side of that ratio, the other fishermen can call you Chumpy.

The question that I actually have to call experts to ask about is if there is a great advantage in Kinds Or Sizes Of Fish You Catch. A good way to get laughed at in the inventor parties is to invent something useless. "Look, I made a seven foot Q-Tip!.... Why are all of you laughing?"

Using this chart of Duxbury Beach as a guide, you can see that a really good human cast would get you in 8-10 feet of water. If you wade out a lot and cast (a dangerous practice, seeing as Great White Sharks work off Duxbury Beach), you may get into 12-18 feet of water.... not too shabby, but we're thinking we can double that if one of our half-fast inventions works.

Generally and disappointingly, you aren't going to get a much greater variety of fish a few hundred yards offshore. You have go deep-deep to get tunas and stuff like that. However, unusual fish do make it close to shore, with "close" meaning "a few hundred yards." Why not take a crack at them, especially if you get to shoot a crossbow (see below) or something?

Anyhow, here are the ideas we have pondered and abandoned.

Crossbow

The vision you're having is correct... attach fishing gear to a crossbow bolt, aim the crossbow at an upward angle, and fire that sucker towards the deep water. The arrow could even act as the bobber, and you'd get the arrow back if everything works out right.

I just chose a crossbow because it looks like the most fun. A longbow may be superior, I'm not really sure. "Agincourt" keeps looking for an avenue into this conversation, although that was more of a rate-of-fire thing than a superiority-of-thrust thing. If Agincourt was a battle to catch the most fish, we might all be speaking French right now.

My last name is Bowden, so I really wanted this invention to work, because I could call it the Bow-Caster and make an informercial. I've got a pretty strange Bucket List, people... be happy that I'm not telling you all of the Bad Things on it. You'd have to sanitize your medulla oblongata if I did.

Before we get into the engineering problems with this, there are two distinct psychological problems.

One, you don't want the joy of casting to surpass the joy of fishing. This might happen is you get too into casting by crossbow. Eventually, your surfcasting experience boils down to something like watching pornography for the wooden acting scenes that bookend the hardcore stuff.

Two, if you get THAT into shooting the arrows, you may as well just buy a wetsuit and go spearfishing. This will take you offshore- and, thusly, out of this article.

The flight of an arrow is really a splendid thing, a little miracle of aerodynamics. You apply great and sudden force to the arrow, and it flies through the air... goddamnit, I'll say it, as straight as an arrow.

That miracle is messed up if you add the weight of a lure, a hook and whatever else you might have on the line. I say "messed up" because I don't know the scientific terms like lift, drag, bouyancy, flight-to-drag ratio and thrust-to-weight ratio. What I do know is that it will slow the arrow down, make it drop faster, and have a poor effect on the accuracy.

The arrow pre-dates recorded history, and is common among all cultures. If this idea actually had any merit, some Navajo or Mongol would have figured it out long ago.

A friend of mine who plays Dungeons and Dragons told me that I may need something called a Ballista.


Skyrocket/Cannon

I look for examples of my ideas being tried out somewhere on Earth while doing my research, and I was really counting on Redneck America to bail me out on this one. I found nothing on it, although it may be done in parts of the South where they don't have the Internet yet.

I like this one because it is almost 100% against the law. The lawbreaking occurs when we realize that a skyrocket only goes 100 yards or so, and that's before you somehow hook fishing gear to it. You need more power than a skyrocket, and at that point, you start getting into a private-citizen-discharge-of-artillery.

The basic idea is to use skyrockets to propel your bait into the deeper water. We'll get to cannons in a moment, but we can use skyrockets to illustrate the problems we have encountered.

The first issue is one of performance difficulties. A single skyrocket will not lift fishing gear, let alone carry it very deep into the sea. No, you can't tie 10 skyrockets together. You'll still only go 100 yards. I don't think that firing them off in a rifled barrel would help either, but I'm also not that into ballistics. Anyhow, at that point, you may as well buy some hip-waders.

A problem we encountered was that the fire-discharge of the skyrocket damages the fishing line. It's bad when you shred the line and it never gets to the water. It's worse when you get it out there in a damaged state, latch onto a fish, and the strength of the fish is the last straw for your damaged fishing line.

We also tried cannon. No, not a howitzer like they use to level Iraqi villages, but a personal-use cannon. If the TSA is really reading our email and Google searches, they'll have a few frightened moments when they see me looking for terms like "personal use artillery."

I had one of these cast-iron cannons as a kid, we used Bangsite to power it, and we could shoot a marshmallow about 100 yards. If we could do that legally, imagine what could be done if we were willing to live outside of the law a bit?

You want to be careful, because it will be very bad for your ego to be at the hospital, telling a nurse, "I was using explosives so I could add 150 yards to my surfcasting." You don't want the surgeon giggling while he's trying to re-attach your fingers.

Like I said, Johnny Law may not share your enthusiasm for alternative casting methods, especially if there are explosions involved with it. Check your local regulations.


Balloon/Kites

This method involves attaching the bait to balloons, floating it out to a desired distance, and then snapping the fishing gear away from the balloon and dropping it into the sea.

This is the only idea I had where I actually found people doing it somewhere. In Australia, bait is floated out on balloons to catch fish such as shark and marlin. A black marlin weighing 200 pounds was caught off of Jervis Bay using balloon casting. They also go after tuna, kingfish, and sharks.

I was thinking more along the lines of a kite, but balloons are the only wind instruments being used in reality anywhere.

Check that... the guys who charter out of Scituate Lobster Pound use kites to fish for tuna, although they are usually off Stellwagen Bank, not standing on the shore.


Drones

This would be very similar to kite-fishing, but even cooler. You can kill the Jack Of Spades in Al Qaeda with a fishing rod, but it would be difficult. They kill them with drones all the time, however.

My nephew just got one of these for Christmas, and it is iller than Ben Stiller. It is some hyrdroplane looking device, with 4 mini helicopter turbines. It has a range of a few hundred yards, and even has a camera. If you're a pretty girl laying on Duxbury Beach and a strange machine is hovering over you and filming, it's probably my nephew.

This would be handy to adjust for surfcasting. You'd attach the gear to it, get the gear over the desired fishing spot, and disattach it somehow. You'd even have the camera to spy out the water you're working, maybe even drop the bait right into a school you've seen on the camera.

The problem here is that a good gust of wind could blow your drone into the Atlantic, and they are rather costly. You also don't want to get too technical about fishing. It is a man vs. nature sport, and using a mobile air camera to fish is sort of like Sea Rape. Tuna boats do it, but they're doing it to pay their mortgage, not because they want to cast 300 yards offshore on a lark. They're off the scale.



Boat-casting

This is cheating, and real fishermen will snap their lines at you and try to hook your ear if they see you doing it. It is essentially like what Rosie Ruiz did in that Marathon. However, if you're not after style points, this could just be right up your alley.

As a boat or jet-ski is leaving the shoreline, have them tow your bait way the hell out and drop it. Make sure they are prepared for your fishing line to suddenly snap back when the line goes taut, lest you catch a 200 pound Angrius Boaterus.

Again, this could be a lot of effort and energy for an affair that might see your bait eaten by a crab in 30 seconds.

Know that real fishermen call this Punk-casting. You won't get your ass kicked directly over it, but the resulting conversation could be filled with many forked roads of potential diplomatic transgressions that would have you reading Nikes. Again, at this point, just buy the hip-waders.

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I suppose this is why they invented boats, but that doesn't mean that a guy can't use his imagination a bit.

"Trust in God, but row away from the rocks."... old fishing proverb