The Ocean under the Moon

By Tony Stubits

What if the American Dream is a lie? All of his life, Nick Stamos has been told if he works hard enough, good things will happen. As a third generation shrimp boat captain, he knows what hard work is all about. But what happens when hard work is not enough? With globalization, a poor economy, and other factors out of his control, he still can't make ends meet. What is Nick going to do? Will he make the ultimate sacrifice for his family?

Set on a beautiful island in Florida, this thought-provoking story is sure to bring tears as well as recognition from readers in these difficult times. Follow Nick's journey through life, a life that is like the ocean under the moon; beautiful on the surface, but there are many hazards underneath.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Stubits
• Release date: Jun 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458162748

Tony Stubits

Tony Stubits lives on Amelia Island, Florida. He enjoys boating and golfing. Author of the medical thriller, Unnatural Selection, he now returns with, The Ocean under the Moon, a serious literary effort, and finalist in the 2011 Indie Book Awards for fiction.

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Prologue

July 13, 2008

3:16 p.m.

Nick had consumed a six-pack of beer and was feeling just right. The alcohol coursed through his arteries and made its way to his brain and he felt strangely relaxed, considering what he was about to do. He’d put the nets back out and the boat was on autopilot, doing a slow drag to the south. Since there wasn’t anything to do now but enjoy the scenery, he opened a fresh beer and went up to the bow of the shrimp boat.

The sea breeze kicked in about thirty minutes ago, and he sat down on the storage box in front of the pilothouse to enjoy the breeze and the apparent wind created by the forward movement of the boat.

The Resurrection motored about three and a half miles off the shoreline of Amelia Island, working its way south, parallel to the beach, toward Big Talbot Island. The boat droned forward on this familiar route, like an old plow horse that knew its way. He could easily see the tall skyline of Amelia Island Plantation and its rows of high-rise condominiums. He could even make out the small, ant-like movements of people on the beach enjoying their summer vacations.

The island wasn’t the same anymore, he lamented, as he eyed all of the high-rise condos on the south end. When he was growing up on the island, if he and his family went out at night to a restaurant, they would know about ninety percent of the people in the restaurant. Nowadays, when he and Monica went out to eat, they were lucky if they saw anybody they knew.

Between all of the tourists on vacation and wealthy retirees moving down from up North, the previous inhabitants of the island, like the shrimpers, crabbers, mill-workers, and the Afro-Americans at American Beach, were getting squeezed off the island by the constantly rising property taxes. Maybe it was best that he would leave this place; there wasn’t room on the island for his type anymore.

He laid his head back against the pilothouse and closed his eyes. He felt the warm sunshine on his face, the cool breeze across his skin, and smelled the fresh salt air. He’d miss these kinds of moments. As bad as his life and financial situation had become, he still loved his job. If he could make any profit out of what he was doing, he would be willing to work his way out of debt. But since the profit had gone out of shrimping, it was like treading water; a lot of effort expended without getting anywhere.

He’d left Gator’s old boom box blaring out old-time rock songs on the classic rock station, from its post just behind the pilothouse. He was just about to fall asleep for a little catnap when he heard the opening keyboard notes of Free Bird come over the radio. He listened to the languid beginning of the song and instantly thought of his friend. He had sworn to never listen to the song again, but this time, he did not get up and switch it off. He’d hear the song one last time.

Well, if it worked for Gator, maybe it’ll work for me, he muttered to himself, and stood up from his resting place. He was a little woozy from all the beer and it took him a few seconds to get his sea legs, once he stood up. Then he made his way around the side of the pilothouse and stepped inside to grab the broom. When he came out, he moved to the stern of the boat. He jumped up on the transom of the boat, clutched the wooden end of the broom in his left hand and waited for the fast part of the song to begin.

Just before the beginning guitar licks for the up-tempo part of the song, he swiveled the broom into position so his left hand could work the imaginary frets on the broom handle and his right hand could strum the imaginary strings on the straw end. When the fast part of the song kicked in, he jumped off the transom onto the afterdeck and started working his imaginary guitar.

His goal was to play the most frantic air guitar solo ever, and, if he was lucky, he would keel over. The beer gave him a bravado he did not normally possess and he played his fake guitar like a man possessed.

He crouched down low, then reeled way back. He ran from one side of the boat to the other, all the time playing his fake guitar. He jumped on the icebox for a few licks on the guitar, and then jumped off. He played behind his back, between his legs, and with his teeth, a la Jimi Hendrix; then he duck-walked across the afterdeck like Chuck Berry. The song got faster and he ran to the bow of the boat then stopped to do some more gyrations, as if playing to a different section of an audience. Then he ran back to icebox and stepped up on it and then onto the roof of the crew’s quarters.

From the perch on the roof, he discovered why Gator had loved his ritual so much. On top of the crew’s quarters, twenty-something feet above the sea and looking down on everything for miles in every direction, he felt omnipotent, like the king of the ocean. He could imagine how rock stars felt, on a raised stage, looking down on a sea of admirers.

He flopped down and started doing the Gator, the infamous dance that his friend used to do when he was drunk. He was on his belly, moving his arms up and down like an alligator trying to run on ice. He rolled onto his back and gyrated his arms and legs up and down like a dying cockroach.

The song reached its crescendo so he jumped back up to his feet, grabbed the broom, and pretended to belt out the last few guitar licks and danced in a circle, hopping on one leg.

When the song finished, he held up the broom in mock triumph, to imagined thunderous applause. Then he dropped the broom and collapsed on his back on top of the crew’s quarters. He waited for a heart attack, but none came. Just heavy, laborious panting, as he was out of breath.

Damn, dying was not going to be easy. He laid his head back against the roof of the crew’s quarters and tried to make his mind go blank—to blot out all the memories, the pain, the struggles—even the good times and the people he loved. But it didn’t work. Forgetting was impossible. It is said that right before a person dies, their whole life flashes before one's eyes. Nick hoped he was going to die tonight, so he closed his eyes, thought about his life, and what had transpired to bring him to this point of desperation.

Chapter 1

July 31, 1960

The earliest memory that Nick could recall from his mind was a day when he was about four years old. He was standing next to the oyster pit his father built in the back yard. The pit was a circular brick structure, about three feet high and four feet in diameter, but was open at the top except for the grate that the oysters were placed on to roast. His father, Abe, had just taken a batch of steamed oysters into the house, leaving him alone by the fire when he had seen his opportunity.

Earlier in the day, he’d discovered a box of .22-caliber bullets in his father’s nightstand. His young mind had been fascinated with fireworks, since the Fourth of July just a few weeks earlier, and having seen his father load bullets into the pistol and shoot at cans in the back yard, he’d grabbed a small handful and stuck them into his pocket.

When his father took the oysters inside the house, young Nick saw his opportunity and threw the bullets into the fire. At first, nothing happened, then there was a loud explosion and a bullet ricocheted off the brick structure sending shrapnel past his head. Only then did his young mind realize the potential danger involved.

His father came running out of the house, almost knocking the door off its hinges.

Nick get down! His father yelled at him to take cover, but it was unnecessary as Nick had already started for the corner of the house, sprinting for the safety of the front yard.

He would never see his father as mad as he was that night. Red-faced, his father screamed at him that he could have killed himself. However, due to good fortune, and the circular brick wall sending the bullets off in fortuitous angles, nobody had been hit. He was sent to his room for what seemed like a week, and it was then that young Nick realized there were consequences for your actions in life.

* * *

Nickolas Markos Stamos had been born on May 19, 1956, at Humphrey’s Memorial Hospital in Fernandina Beach, Florida. The town was located on Amelia Island, a fourteen-mile-long barrier island in the very northeast corner of Florida, next to Georgia. As related to Nick later, his birth had been difficult, being his mother’s, Isabelle’s, first child. Labor lasted over fourteen hours and for a while there was concern for both the mother and child because of the position of the fetus and the lack of progress, but the baby finally turned and presented itself to the world.

The long delivery had been a blessing in a way because it allowed Nick’s father, Abeiron, or Abe as everyone called him, to make it back from sea just in time for the delivery. Not that he saw the birth, as in those times the father was confined to the waiting area. But he was there for the delivery of the news and to pass out cigars. He was excited about the birth of his child and for it to be a boy, was almost too good to be true.

His father had a reason to be excited beyond the usual primal need for a man to have a son. Abe was a second-generation shrimper, a man who made his living from the sea. Thirty years old at the time of Nick’s birth, Abe was of Greek heritage. At the time, he possessed dark, jet-black hair highlighted by his brilliant green eyes. His Mediterranean skin was tanned from years at sea, but he was young enough that his face was empty of the permanent lines and flaws that all fishermen develop over time.

That day, however, the corners of his eyes were wrinkled somewhat because his smile was so large. He now had a son, who held the promise to fill many needs for him. For now there was someone to teach the ways of the sea and to use as a deckhand, first mate, and eventual successor when he got too old to go to sea.

* * *

Nick would learn later, all of his father’s hopes and dreams were centered on his son following in his legacy. His difficult birth rendered his mother unable to have any more children. This would place the continuation of the Stamos shrimping dynasty squarely upon his young shoulders.

Chapter 2

June 23, 1967

Hurry up, Bobby. Time’s a’ wasting, Nick yelled to his friend who was struggling to ride his bicycle up the short, but steep, Fourteenth Street Bridge while holding on to his sandboard. Now eleven years old, Nick had grown into the confident leader of his small band of friends. He and his friends, Chuck Tomlinson and David Crumpler, were sitting on their bikes at the top of the bridge waiting for Bobby Peters to catch up to them.

The bridge spanned Egan’s Creek, whose freshwater beginnings started in the center of the island and ran north, in a curve like a paring knife, getting saltier, and lined by marshes on each side, until it passed under the bridge they were sitting on and emptied into the Amelia River at the northwestern end of the island. The creek, at the boys’ location, separated Old Town, a small community of shrimpers and crabbers living on the bluff of land on the south bank of the creek, from the north bank.

Old Town was where Nick lived. Even at his young age, Nick knew he lived on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. From his schoolwork and his grandfather’s stories, Nick knew that, even though all the important history of the island, up to the middle of the last century, had happened on the bluff of land where he lived now, with the coming of the railroad all that changed. When the Spanish owned the island, the main mode of transportation was by ship. Therefore, they’d platted the original town of Fernandina on the large bluff overlooking the deep harbor in the Amelia River.

Later, after the Americans took over the island, the town was moved south, on the other side of a marshy area just south of Old Town. This was due to the construction of a railroad line onto the island; they didn’t want to build a bridge over the marshland. The new, larger town was platted and also called Fernandina. The new Fernandina would boom in the late 1800s due to an influx of tourists coming by train or steamship from the North to enjoy the mild climate. The old Fernandina would be forgotten and left to the fishermen and crabbers.

Nick, however, liked living in Old Town. For a young boy growing up, the area possessed a lot of opportunity for adventure. Today, he and his friends were about to embark on a new one. From his perch on his bike looking north in the direction they were headed, Nick knew there were only two directions to go.

One road turned to the left and followed the north bank of the creek to the pogy plant. The pogy plant was a dilapidated fish processing facility that sent boats out into the ocean to catch pogy fish, or menhaden, as Nick had learned they were more properly called. Nick didn’t care for the pungent odor the plant produced when it ground up the oily fish up to be used in oils, fertilizer, animal feed and even perfumes. He hated when the wind came out of the wrong direction and the smell wafted over his house on the bank across from the plant.

The other road at the bottom of the bridge going north was the back way into Fort Clinch State Park. The huge park, over a thousand acres, wrapped around this end of the island from its campground on the northwest corner of the island, to the Civil War era fort located on the northern tip overlooking the entrance to Cumberland Sound, to the fishing pier beside the southernmost jetty that demarcates the entrance to the sound. The park extended southward, with a winding road through the maritime forest, to its main vehicular entrance on Atlantic Avenue.

Since the main entrance was about a three-mile bike ride from Old Town, the boys never used the real entrance. Even if the boys had the fifty-cent entrance fee to spare—which they never did—it was much more fun and adventurous to sneak in the back way. The only problem was, if the park rangers caught you in there without a sticker on your bike proving admission to the park, they would escort you out. This cat-and-mouse game with the rangers just heightened the adventure for Nick and his friends.

Once inside the park, the boys had all kinds of options. They could go to the campground area on the edge of the Amelia River, which offered great climbing trees and tall, wooded sand dunes to run up and down. Or they could go to Willow Pond, a swampy area with several algae-covered ponds, complete with alligators and the occasional otter.

Sometimes the boys caught fiddler crabs along the shore of Egan’s Creek, put them in a bucket, then grabbed their cane poles and bikes and rode into the park to go fishing at the jetties. The jetties were large boulders or jettison that’d been brought in to line the north and south sides of the entrance to Cumberland Sound—the waterway separating Amelia Island from Cumberland Island in Georgia. On this side, the big rocks started at the beach just east of Fort Clinch and extended in a line eastward into the Atlantic Ocean for about a quarter of a mile, to keep shifting sand out of the channel.

Nick and his friends would climb out onto the barnacle-encrusted rocks with a cane pole in hand and, using the fiddler crabs for bait, try to catch sheepshead that hung around the huge boulders. They had to pay attention to the tides, however, fishing around the low tides when the rocks were best exposed.

Due to the seven-foot variance between low tide and high tide, if the boys didn’t head back to shore soon enough to beat the incoming tide, they would find themselves stranded on the high rocks with the lower spots submerged, cutting them off from shore. Swimming back to shore was out of the question, due to the treacherous currents and waves pounding the rocks, so if you got stranded you had a long wait until the tide went out again. They also wore tennis shoes to protect their feet from the barnacles and oyster shells, because even if the tide didn’t catch them, one slip on the algae-covered rocks could lead to a painful gash from the sharp crustaceans and a long, painful bike ride home.

Nick’s favorite option, however, was to ride to the five-sided brick fort overlooking the sound. The fort came complete with a moat, a drawbridge, rifle ports, cannons, and a two-story bastion on the end of each of its five points. The boys would divide up into two teams and play a form of hide-and-seek with each team trying to capture the other.

If you were tagged by the seeking team, then you had to go and sit in the old jail, which had four cells complete with bars on the doors and windows. A player could be released from jail by a tag of one of his teammates, if that player could get in and out of the jail without being tagged himself.

There were hundreds of hiding places in the fort and the game would sometimes last hours. There were long chases along the top of the brick walls, up and down stairs, and through the numerous hallways and tunnels. The boys would be almost too exhausted at the end of the day to ride their bikes home.

Hey, guys. Wait up, Bobby said. He dismounted his bike to push it up the bridge, since he was struggling to hold onto the handlebars, carry his sandboard, and pedal the bike up the steep incline.

Today, the boys were going to do something different. Just a week ago, Nick and his friends had seen the surfing movie, Endless Summer. The documentary about two surfers on a worldwide quest to find the perfect wave motivated the boys to try their own surfing safari. Since none of the boys possessed the money for a real surfboard, David came up with the idea of making a sandboard and looking for the perfect dune instead of the perfect wave.

For the last week, the boys had been busy working on their sandboards. They each took a one-inch-thick, six-inch-wide board and cut it about five feet long. Next they used a file and curved up the front edge of the board. Then they’d nailed a one-inch by one-inch strip of wood about five inches long to the board, slightly more forward than halfway on the board. After some paint and decals, their sandboards had been complete.

Now the trick was to find a dune with just the right steepness of grade. Sand has a lot more friction than water, so a dune needed to be found with a grade steep enough to overcome that friction, but not so steep the boys would tumble over the front of their boards.

Where do you think we should go? Chuck asked, while they were waiting for Bobby to reach the top of the bridge.

The area just east of the fort, toward the Jetty Lodge, has the best dunes, Nick said.

While he, Chuck, and David waited at the top of the bridge for Bobby to catch up to them, Nick took in the view of his surroundings. To the southwest, he could see the white cottage that he lived in with his parents, Abe and Isabelle, and grandparents, Eber and Catherine. The two-story, wooden house stood on the high bluff overlooking where Egan’s Creek flows into the Amelia River. Nick knew his grandfather acquired the land at a tax auction back in the 1930s, during the depth of the Great Depression. This was now the base of the family shrimping business.

He noticed the docks were empty, as the three shrimp boats that were berthed there were all out to sea. This meant that his grandfather, father, and the other boat that the family leased out to another shrimper, were all out trying to catch shrimp.

The bluff of land that his family lived on owned quite a long history. A few months ago, his parents had taken him to a play performed in the courtyard of Fort Clinch, called The Eight Flags of Amelia, reenacting scenes from the past of the island.

The first Europeans to land here brought the flag of France. The French encountered the Timucuan Indians, a native tribe that was located here for centuries. They’d apparently loved shellfish—something Nick could relate to, as he and his family did also—and he even knew that the mounds that he and his friends played on near his house were the covered-up remains of piles of oyster shells that the Timucuans had thrown into enormous heaps, called middens.

The Spanish drove the French from the area and developed a mission, named Santa Maria, on the bluff where Nick now lived with his family. The streets in Old Town still maintained their Spanish names, and the site where the fort used to be located was now a grassy field by the river—a great space for Nick and his friends to play.

England held the island for awhile in the 1700s, and it was the British name that had stuck—after Princess Amelia. But Nick’s favorite part of the play was about the three groups of adventurers who each seized control briefly, raising their flags—the Patriots of Amelia, Sir Gregor MacGregor’s Green Cross of Florida, and the pirate Luis Aury with his Mexican Rebel flag.

The local story was that the pirate Aury left in such a hurry, he buried some of his treasure somewhere on the island. Other pirates possessed their own legends that were also part of Fernandina’s rich lore, and Nick and his friends spent a lot of their time searching for buried treasure. But after weeks of digging holes around Old Town, all the boys found for their hard work was a collection of old bottles and arrowheads.

Eventually, Florida of course became part of the United States. At the start of the Civil War, the Confederate flag flew over Fernandina for about a year. But when the U.S. gunboats showed up, the Rebels retreated without firing a shot. From then on, Old Glory reigned supreme.

Nick knew from his grandfather’s stories that Fernandina had been a booming tourist destination during the Reconstruction a hundred years before, but then the tourists went farther south and the town became a quiet little village, undisturbed by the passing of time. After the turn of the century, it was fishing and shrimping that brought prosperity—until the Great Depression hit. After the depression, it was the construction of two paper mills that drove the island’s economy.

Nick looked south, past his house, and he could see the larger of the two paper mills, on the island. Container Corporation was located on a marshy area of land near Old Town. It was a sprawling, mechanical behemoth running day and night, spewing noise and smoke. On hot, summer nights when his mother opened all the windows in the house to get a breeze, Nick had trouble sleeping from all the noise coming from the gigantic mill.

Trains and trucks constantly brought pine logs there, and they were chipped, mashed and cooked into pulp, which eventually made its way into brown paper for paper bags and cardboard boxes. Since the end of the1930s, when the two mills had been built, reviving the economy, most Fernandina residents worked either at one of the two mills or in a business that supported the mills, or that served the workers. All of Nick’s friends’ fathers worked at one of the mills—only the fishermen, crabbers and shrimpers, like his family, were independent of the mills.

Rayonier, the smaller of the two mills, was located south of the city docks downtown, out of Nick’s sight and mind. That mill turned the southern pine trees into cellulose fibers that were used in all kinds of products, like toothpaste and film. Besides the greater distance from his house, Nick had another reason to like Rayonier better than Container. Rayonier maintained a pipeline that ran from the mill across the island to discharge straight into the Atlantic Ocean, and the mill’s liquid by-products contained a large amount of ammonia.

Whenever the ocean got rough during storms, like in a common nor’easter, the ammonia caused massive banks of foam to build up along the shoreline. The crashing of the waves would build up banks of foam up to five feet high. When Nick was younger, he and his friends played hide-and-seek by disappearing into the walls of foam. It was hard to breathe inside the foam banks, due to the strong, acidic smell, so the boys would run into the banks of foam, holding their breath as long as they could, then dash back out to daylight and clean air, when they ran out of breath. They also used the foam to create fake beards and moustaches on their faces.

Hurry up, Bobby, Nick implored. The sand dunes took over a hundred years to get as big as they are, but they may be gone by the time you make it to the top of this bridge.

I’m coming, Bobby responded, as he dropped his sandboard for about the tenth time.

While he waited for Bobby, Nick looked over the side of the bridge at the creek below. Nick wondered if there were any trout lying in wait in the trout hole today. He knew that it wasn’t the best time of the year to catch trout because it was too hot, but if there were any, they would be hanging out in the cooler water, deep in the trout hole just east of the bridge.

Whenever he was not in school, and Eber was not out shrimping, his grandfather would take him fishing. Some of his fondest memories were of himself, as a small boy, scurrying about the shoreline trying to catch fiddler crabs before they could disappear into their little holes. His grandfather had shown him how to catch the small crabs to use as bait. Then, using the fiddler crabs or live shrimp they caught with a cast net, they would fish for red drum, spotted sea trout, or flounder.

If the tide was coming in, they would float up Egan’s Creek, casting along the shoreline. They would always stop at the trout hole, just on the other side of the bridge, to see if the trout were biting at that time and tide.

Nick couldn’t wait until his grandfather retired from shrimping. Then he and Grandpa could go fishing all the time. His grandfather had told him that this coming fall’s shrimp run was going to be his last and that next year they would have plenty of time to go fishing together.

Bobby finally made it to the top of the bridge and shook Nick free from his random thoughts.

Are you guys ready to go on a surfin’ safari and find the perfect dune? Nick asked.

Ye-ah! the others yelled.

Then let’s go! Nick exclaimed as he pushed his bike forward and started coasting down the steep incline of the bridge followed closely by his friends.

Chapter 3

August 8, 1968

Grandpa, why don’t you trade in this old wooden rowboat and get an aluminum Jon boat with a motor? the boy asked, as his grandfather rowed them toward their favorite fishing spot on this hot August morning.

Nick was twelve years old now, old enough to question his grandfather’s old-fashioned ways. He knew that his grandfather, Eber, came from the old country, having emigrated to the United States in 1913, from the Greek island of Ikaria. Grandpa came from a long line of fishermen from the island town of Agios Kirikos.

His grandfather was still spry for his age, the boy thought as he looked with admiration at the stubborn old man. He was a short, wiry man, his face weathered from years at sea and reflecting his Mediterranean heritage.

Rowing gets my blood going, and keeps me young, Grandpa responded. Besides, all those years of trying to keep those old diesel engines running on my shrimp boats has left me with a bad taste in my mouth for anything mechanical.

His grandfather quit shrimping eight months ago. At seventy-four years old, he no longer felt like getting up early and spending several days at sea. He relinquished that hard life to Abe, his son and Nick’s father, who was supporting the family now by shrimping full-time on one of Eber’s boats. The other two boats that he owned, he leased out to other shrimpers for extra income.

If the weather was good and the shrimp were running, Grandpa would still go out on occasion with Abe or one of the other crews as an extra hand. Otherwise, the seasoned old shrimper would hang out with the other old shrimpers at Joe Tringali’s dock or David Cook’s dock downtown and swap sea stories about the good old days. If he wasn’t at the docks telling tales or at the Marina Restaurant eating lunch, he was out fishing in his little boat, either with Nick, or by himself, or with one of his old shrimping buddies.

Nick inherently loved fishing. It was a gene that was passed from Eber to Abe and then to him. He loved everything about fishing, from catching the bait, to baiting the hook, to understanding the currents and tides, to casting in the proper spot, to setting the hook, then battling the fish to the boat, and seeing what came out of the water. Every day of fishing was like Christmas Day, and Nick couldn’t wait to see what presents the waterways held.

They would usually head up the creek to try and catch red drum or spotted sea trout. If the fish weren’t biting up the creek, they could try catching sheepshead around the rocks next to the old pogy plant. Their plan on this day, however, was to row out the river toward Fort Clinch and fish for flounder.

Whew! Nick said, as his grandfather rowed them past the plant that morning. The pogy plant is really stinking it up today.

He and Grandpa could put up with the foul odor that the plant produced, because the rocks that were placed where Egan’s Creek met the Amelia River, to control erosion around the plant, made for great structure for sheepshead to hide in. Nick liked fishing for sheepshead, because they were both easy and hard to catch. Easy, in that the equipment and bait needed were simple. All that was necessary was a cane pole, fishing line, lightweight sinker, and a small hook.

Also, since sheepshead like to hang around rocks and pilings, they eat oysters, clams, barnacles, and fiddler crabs—all readily available to Nick and his friends by catching fiddler crabs in the marshes, scraping barnacles off the rocks and pilings, and raiding the oyster beds.

The challenge to catching sheepshead was that with their small, hard mouths and several rows of stubby teeth—resembling a sheep, thus the name—they like to crush their prey and eat slowly. So, unlike most other fish that tend to gulp their prey, resulting in a hard tug on the fishing line signaling a bite, sheepshead tend to grind their food. Nick knew the trick was to feel the gentle pull of the sheepshead as it started to nibble on the bait and allow it enough time to get the food well into its mouth, but not waiting too long as to let it steal the bait off the hook.

Today, though, they were not out for sheepshead. To take advantage of a west wind and an outgoing tide, they had left at eight-thirty that morning. This time of year, they knew that the wind would be nonexistent, or a light, west wind in the morning; then, as the land heated up, a cooler, stronger sea breeze would blow in from the east, off the ocean.

They planned to go north, past the pogy plant and around the northern end of the island into Cumberland Sound to the rocks around Fort Clinch. The currents were significant there, running in and out of the sound to and from the ocean, so they would have to hug the shoreline and pay close attention to the tides. Rowing easily with the current since the tide just started going out, they passed the pogy plant and then the small campground on the northwest end of the island.

Not many people in the campground today, Nick commented.

Well, it is the hottest time of the year. The heat has probably scared everybody away, Grandpa said, as he wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.

On this morning, with the wind at their backs, they headed toward one of their favorite fishing spots just west of the fort. A series of small jetties had been placed there to help slow the erosion of sand in front of the fort. The still, shallow water between the small jetties was perfect for catching flounder, which Nick knew to be an ugly, but great-tasting fish. He also knew that flounder are flat-fish, or side-swimmers—both eyes on the same side of the fish. Ambush predators, they lie flat on one side, half-burying themselves in the soft mud or sand, waiting for their unsuspecting prey to swim over them. Their top half, where the eyes are located, is a spotted light brown to match the muddy bottom. Their underside is a soft white color. Their meat is a delicate, white texture and wonderful to eat fried, broiled, or baked.

Another reason Grandpa and Nick liked taking flounder home was that they are easy to eat. Since flounder don’t have scales, there’s no need for the time-consuming, labor-intensive task of removing the scales—just cut off the head, scrape out the guts, dip each side