By Zach Harvey
August. The word, when it first appears on the face of the calendar or beneath the date column in my inbox, triggers something like a panic. It’s not really dread or regret—just a sudden and overwhelming awareness of the speed at which sand dumps into the lower half of the hourglass. It’s like being 23, the world and you all full of promise and potential. And then you’re 35, no longer on the verge of becoming. You are what you are—hell, you have been for years.
The season no longer has that expansive quality. It’s painfully finite now—another one in the act of getting away from us. The reality, of course, is that there’s still a ton of season ahead. This August reflex is something I’ve drilled into my own brain, mainly as a reminder—when there really is still time—to fish mindfully, to see a run offshore through on the first invite, to do it now, rather than putting it off and then realizing I’ve missed it by a full month.
After working weekly for so many years, this monthly gig was really throwing my sense of seasonal timing for a loop in the earlier issues. For those of you who are picking this up for the first time, or who missed last month’s issue, the advent of weekly fishing updates via our website has dialed things back in again. Now heading into the fourth consecutive week, we’re beginning to fine-tune the process—the repetition of it a natural part of a thought process that began months back.
I’m excited about these new weekly electronic blasts for two major reasons. First, I hate trying to forecast fishing that’s three weeks to a month out. Given this season’s spectacularly funky timing, making a guess about future fishing proved even more impossible than I’d imagined. Let’s face it: Of all the greenhorn questions in fishing, “How’s the fishing going to be next week?” is the A-number-1, blue ribbon prize-winner (to the extent that when I asked captains I’ve known for almost 20 years the question with a straight face earlier this season, I felt real physical pain. Of course, that’s all history now. We’re doing the where-and-when stuff weekly.
The second major positive of the new updates is that they have freed up all the space in these monthly print vehicles to delve quite a bit deeper into the tactical elements, the prime spots in general, the major conservation issues, and other kinds of info with significantly longer shelf-life. We have now streamlined the way we deliver fishing news in a major way, delivering each part of it through the most effective channel. If you missed the boat, you can sign up to get the weekly reports on our website: www.coastalanglermag.com/rhodeisland.
With one technical hiccup to date, the plan is to assemble these entries late on Thursdays, then paste them up Friday mornings. Naturally, as I noted here last month, the idea is to give you the most up-to-date fishing intel from the most reliable sources right around the time you and your fishing buddies are synchronizing “family emergencies” that will spring you from corporate captivity early enough to beat seventh-circle-of-hell* traffic (*which lies between the three lights on Route 4, or 138 southbound where Route 24 and 114 merge, around 5 p.m. Friday afternoon).
While we’re on the subject, I wanted to pass along a few thoughts about these fishing report broadcasts. First, they’re free (“free” not just in the monetary, but in the psychic sense: We are not assembling a massive marketing contact list, won’t Spam or otherwise assail you). To be brutally honest, the idea with these things is to help the sport-fishing industry in this state, and hopefully, to motivate our readership to get out and take full advantage of our state’s considerable marine assets. We need you to sign up for secure delivery of a live link every Friday morning because we need your eyeballs on our website to keep us visible in the endless festering intellectual landfill of cyberspace. Second, I’m willing to sacrifice my own comfort and sanity every Thursday evening because I want our readership and the sport-fishing industry in this state to see just how serious Lisa and Mike and I are about this undertaking.
As I noted in the first couple entries of this column last winter, one thing that is mission-critical for us is that, if you like this magazine and find the weekly supplemental blasts useful, by all means support the businesses that keep us going by advertising, and while you’re at it, let them know that you saw them here. These days, when high-tech marketing has sold itself mainly on the premise that it can spy on viewers—can “prove” the results it delivers. This focus has not been kind to traditional print media; we are in the middle of a widespread migration on to the web, where ad rates are minuscule to the extent that no one involved can make a living.
I’ve always maintained, as all professional writers have, that in order to get consistently good information that’s easy to digest, or timely information about issues with huge gravity, sooner or later someone needs to get paid.
If, as a culture, we continue to put a higher value on “free” reading material than we do on the quality of available information, then at some point all too soon, you’re going to have to learn how to predict peak fishing windows in Tweet form. Mind you, those of you who read this thing will be doing your civic duty if you support the small, “owner-operated” tackle shops, charter boats, party boats, and other support businesses that comprise RI’s sport-fishing industry. It’s only right you should get this magazine—in essence a guide to that industry—for free.
Not one of us at CAM-RI is getting rich doing this; we’re doing it because we all believe it’s worth doing right. But if we’re going to keep doing it, we need your help: Spread the word. I still believe in the power of grassroots, and I believe this state—where everyone knows everyone else and is likely related to one out of five—was tailor-made to operate that way. If fishing is anything, it’s a world of tangible friendships, of deals made and honored by handshake, an activity real people do in places you can point out on a chart. The yield of a day’s fishing—a catch put together through hunches and misfires, false-starts, and breakthroughs—can be weighed and measured, seen, smelled and tasted. I hope I’m not alone when I suggest that a big part of the sport’s appeal is that it serves as a sanctuary from a world gone virtual, and a population heading—for all of our incessant messaging—into a state of perpetual disconnect. I like to think—hope you agree— that if any place can keep the fishery going, it’s the Ocean State.
But if you read us and over the coming months and years come to depend on it as a consistent source for trustworthy fishing news and critical expertise, you should by all means spread the word. Tell your friends to check out our weekly updates, to track down a copy each month. Tell the shops or charter boats where you shop that you get your news here. Give them the proof they seek—that their real, live, three-dimensional customer base counts on us. Tell ‘em you’re reading our reports.
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