Tidelines – June 21, 2012
In the wake of Father’s Day, I’m trying to figure out where I stand on the Good Dad/Bad Dad chart.
Making plans on Father’s Day can be tricky. On the surface it’s presented as our day, a day that Dads can make plans to do whatever they wish.
The subtext, though, and the reality of that statement is that we can do anything we wish as long as it involves our kids and family. After all (it’s at least implied if not overtly stated), what kind of Dad wouldn’t want to spend the day with his family?
So when my buddy Mark (a father of two girls) and I (a father of three boys) started playing with plans to go fishing on Father’s Day, we knew we needed an effective proposal to get wife approval. We also knew, since we’re both experienced players in the intricacies and subtleties involved in the approval process, that we couldn’t put in too big of a request.
For a couple of resourceful guys, the answer was clear—a compromise. We start fishing at sunrise and are back to the docks by 11:00 or so to then spend the rest of the day with our families. I was the first to get official clearance, and then Mark received confirmation a few hours later.
Sunday morning went smoothly, as we left the dock soon after 6:00 am. Mark and I have been struggling to align both free time and good weather to go on either his skiff or my bayboat to catch some sea bass and flounder off the beach, and somehow we talked ourselves into thinking that Father’s Day was our open window.
Anyone with offshore interests knows that winds were up and seas were sloppy this past weekend, and my 22’ bayboat had no reason to be in that mix. Still, the promise of putting big, delicious fish in the cooler was strong, so Mark and I ran out of Rich’s Inlet in spite of the conditions. We made it out about four miles before common sense kicked in and we turned back to look for inshore opportunities.
So what’s our grade so far on the Good Dad/Bad Dad scale? How would you rate a couple of fathers fishing Father’s Day morning without any of their kids on the boat, as well as taking the unnecessary risk of being in seas and navigating an inlet that we shouldn’t have been in?
Later that morning it was traveling behind Figure Eight Island that I saw the first father/son combination that pressed further my morning reflections of Good Dad/Bad Dad.
At the end of a dock was a father helping his son (probably a 10-year-old) cast a line into the channel. This was clearly a high ranker on the Good Dad scale, I thought, as Mark and I idled past to work a nearby dock that we believed to be holding drum.
Teaching your child to love fishing? Good Dad. Choosing red drum over your kids?
Then in the area of Mason’s Inlet we passed another father/son combination, and this time the father was teaching the son (this one probably more like a 13-year-old) how to navigate their Scout center console in the ICW. It was obvious that the day’s lesson was primarily focused on how to pass an oncoming boat and how to best steer through a boat’s wake, as they took several laps back and forth through the same body of water.
Teaching your son to navigate a boat? Good Dad. Leaving your kids at home to drift for flounder around Mason’s?
Mark and I were true to our word. We were back at the docks by 11:00 and spent the rest of the day on the water with our respective families. The Hurley family went on to spend a large part of the afternoon beached on a sandbar to swim and play in the sand. Back at the dock the boys helped me tend the crab trap, release the unused mullet and mud minnows, and fillet a flounder that would later be part of our dinner.
So where would you rank me on the Good Dad/Bad Dad scale? Did Mark and I successfully pull off the compromise and we are absolved, or should the morning red drum and flounder have been for another day?
If I didn’t still feel a little guilty, then I wouldn’t have written on this topic, so how about I run a photo of some kids that participated (with their Good Dads) in the East Coast Sports Youth Fishing Tournament to start earning back some karma points.
