I put some clam strips onto my hooks and lowered them into the water with great anticipation of feeling something pull back. Across the bay I could see Old Barney, the lighthouse that stands against time, tide and weather as a navigation beacon and a tourist attraction. I arrived on a beautiful morning with flat water and paddled out to the inter-coastal buoy on the bay. So, up until this summer, I had never eaten a blowfish.ĭecades passed, as did my beloved grandpop, and a few weeks ago, I wanted to stop thinking about it, so I set off for Waretown on the mainland side of Barnegat Bay on a blowfish kayak fishing safari.īefore I went, I prepared myself by joining a few social media groups for fishing on the bay. Loved catching fish, not so much eating them. The adults tried to get me to eat some of the catch, but I was a kid who didn’t want to eat fish. They had different names for the meat of the fish but I remember poor man’s lobster as the name most commonly used. They also clean into one almost lobster tail-like piece of white meat, and I remembered the adults making a big fuss whenever grandpop and I would bring some back from the bay. Blowfish have the ability to inflate themselves many times larger than they really are which helps to discourage predators. He gently lowered the fish, which to me looked like a small ball, into the water, where it floated and bobbed with the waves for a few seconds until it deflated itself and promptly swam down into the safety of the bay. I had never seen anything like that before and it was astounding and amusing. Watch what happens when I bring this fish into the boat.”Īnd with that, he produced a fish on the end of his line, took it off of the hook, at which point it began to make a curious croaking noise that signaled that it was puffing itself up. I was younger than 10 years old, and he said, “Look at this Davey Lee. I vividly remember the first time grandpop landed what he called a balloon fish. (Or maybe he was just enjoying an ice cold beer.) When was in my teens, grandpop switched roles with me and, having taught me for years, made me the captain of the boat with no name and gave me the responsibility of taking us to the fishing grounds as he stayed up on the bow and kept watch for sea monsters. In particularly, I remember an old beat-up ruins of some sort of building toward the strip of land that separated the bay from the ocean. As we headed out in the little boat, I’d always sit up front to observe for grandpop, you know, in case a whale or something got in our way out there in 4 feet of bay water.Īs I got older, grandpop would point out objects on shore that he was navigating by. Running the gauntlet of biting insects was part of the ritual to get to the fishing grounds. Mosquitoes and green-headed biting flies ruled the sky, and we routinely braved swarms of them to get to the boat and bay.
Nowadays that place of my youthful adventures with grandpop is a built-up, modernized complex of what has to be multi-million dollar homes, docks, campgrounds, businesses and lagoons that host plenty of boats worth hundreds of thousands of dollars each.īack 50 years ago, grandpop’s fishing shack was one of only a few on an unfinished, sandy road with lots of frogs trying to cross it during the night. I recently took a trip down to the area to see how the old place looks, and, no surprise, I couldn’t recognize a single thing except maybe the boat launch area.
Our place of departure was his tiny fishing shack, a half repurposed modular home with a half wooden structural addition, off of Longneck Road on the way to Massey’s Landing on the bay. It was just 12 feet long and powered by a tiny gas outboard motor that was steered by a handle attached directly to the motor. His little boat wasn’t much to brag about. More than 50 years ago, my Grandpop Kline would frequently take me out onto Rehoboth Bay to fish for a unique species of puffer fish, known colloquially in the area of the bay as blowfish or balloon fish.
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