Long Beach Island – Lee Duigon

Weakfish Mystique - On The Water

See that picture? I actually caught a weakfish just like that, one night out on the dock.

We miss fishing! For 23 years, at precisely this time of year, Patty and I rented the same house on Long Beach Island, overlooking Barnegat Bay. We fished every day, weather permitting. After the first week of two, our fishing skills were back up to speed and won us some glorious fish dinners. Weakfish, blowfish, sea robins, fluke, eels, bluefish–wonderful!

But now it’s too far to go, and LBI has changed, and what we’ve got left are memories, good memories that never get stale.

(We caught some rather large sharks, too, but always let them go.)

I couldn’t find a video that quite captures what I want to write about. So imagine these horseshoe crabs, only now it’s night-time, under a glorious full moon with no other light for miles around. And the horseshoe crabs are coming into the shallow water to mate and lay their eggs.

Years and years ago, Patty and I used to go to Long Beach Island in the spring, for weekends. We liked to fish by night, along the rim of a shallow cove in Barnegat Bay. On a few of those nights, the horseshoe crabs came in, silent and graceful, with only the faintest ripple of the water in the faintest breeze. We felt as if we were seeing something God ordained before He shaped Adam out of the dust of the earth. Something, maybe, that was old in Heaven before it was ever known on earth.

It’s all gone now. They filled in the little cove and built three-story condos on top of it, and the whole place is lit by floodlights all night long. There’s no hint that the little cove ever existed. And you can’t see the starlight on the water anymore. The floodlights drown it out. Maybe there never was any starlight, either. Maybe we dreamed it.

But if we did, the dream beats the stuffing out of condos and floodlights.