Night Blues

NIGHT BLUES My dad and I started going out for night blues when I was about twelve or thirteen. My mom packed us sandwiches and we’d stop at the liquor store for Slim Jims, ginger ale and beer. The boat left the dock from Atlantic City just after sunset. It was a party boat and […]

A Fish Story

Dr Constable pilots Belle 76 to Weakfish Thoroughfare, Brigantine Bay, 1976. My first apprenticeship was at the helm of a Boston Whaler, hunting for flounder and weakfish in the back bays of South Jersey with my dad in the summers of the late 1970s. I could pilot a boat years before I had my driver’s […]

Adams Angling

‘Adams Angling’ is my favorite catalog for thinking about planning an expedition The transition to fair weather from a long and gray, chilly wet season always has me dreaming about excursions to the wilder reaches of Northern California, testing my wits in the face of a more bare mode of survival. While it’s been years […]

Clam Skiff Vernacular

Brigantine beach cottages, alleyway view As a teenager in the seventies I spent summers on the South Jersey shore cooking at a seafood restaurant in Brigantine, a tiny island just to the north of Atlantic City. My great grandfather had built one of the first houses on the island in the 1920’s, my dad worked […]