A Family in Fishing
Howdy, I’ll Be Your Guide
My first trout was a stocker on PowerBait, chartreuse if I had to guess, at Hutchin’s Pond in Calvert County, Maryland. That’s where I’m from—and in Huntingtown, trout are caught sitting on a five-gallon bucket. That beefy rainbow trout found its way to a stringer, like most did, and eventually to the frying pan.
Growing up on the Chesapeake Bay made for an early life of rockfish and blue crabs. Like plenty of fishy fellas, my dad introduced me and inspired me to seek water and phony baits to fulfill my time. I’ve gotten around quite a bit since then, typically with a rod I’ve got no business bringing.
Fly fishing blue lines once I moved to Appalachia is where I’ve felt most at home. Remote streams with hard-to-see files are where I learned to slow down and look around. I found that this way of fishing teaches us to appreciate the tiny bits of life that are hard to see. The river is where time is irrelevant, and the moments get big. It’s been good enough to me that I’d like to share it with the rest of you. The streams are small, and the fish generally follow— but how we got there is worth the trip.
RIBJORD: Ricky, Isabelle, Billy, John, Otis, Regina, Diane
The original RIBJORD was from the sixties, bay boat docked in Deale, MD, named after all the immediate family on my father’s side. As time does, it ate away at that hunk of wood and fiberglass until there was none left.
When I was around twelve, I remember visiting Grandpa in Jupiter, Florida. He was trying to talk my dad into trailering a terribly yellow 24 ft. ‘74 North American Sportfisher. The boatyard had done it no favors; I remember crawling under the hull and feeling the dampness of neglect. But even so, we took her home.
My dad and I spent years chipping away at it little by little— new paint, new floors, chrome horn, working electronics. And eventually, a homecoming of the funny-sounding name. She still runs every spring to fall, I’d argue better than she ever did before we took her out of that boatyard. RIBJORD, to me, is proof that to get anything worthwhile done, you gotta start.
