Charlie Clackery

By Gene Bourque

His name was Charles Clackery and when I was a boy it never occurred to me just how appropriate that name was. Clackery, more like clack-ity, hobbling down the narrow dock, swaying back and forth as he made his way toward the shore, his single crutch tip aimed at the worn planks, avoiding the random gaps between them. On one leg was a steel brace, the permanent reminder of the polio he had contracted during middle age, if I recall my father's stories correctly. That dread disease, just about unknown in this country today but a nightmarish threat when I was a boy in the 1950s must have struck him in the late 1940s or perhaps a little later. In any case, Charlie, as my father and mother and everyone else called him, had survived the malady but always seemed old and heavily worn by wind and waves and weather. How my dad and Charlie became friends I never knew. His age was difficult to gauge but when I was old enough to understand such things my father told me Charlie had worked the Banks on a schooner when he was a boy, catching cod and halibut from a dory. Later on he worked a small wooden dragger in Block Island Sound, the kind of squatty fishing boats that were still quite common in Stonington and Mystic in the 1950s and early 60s. They were about 50 feet long, with a flat forward deck, a small wheelhouse on the port side and a short mast and boom aft that were used to haul the net. The boats were designed to be fished by two or three seamen; Charlie had owned one until it disappeared with hundreds of other craft in southeastern Connecticut and Rhode Island on a September morning in 1938. After serving in the Coast Guard during the war, he had bought some swampy land along the Pawcatuck River, built a long dock out into the river and began offering run-outs for rent by the season. The dock and run-outs suffered mightily every winter as the ice broke up and flowed down to Little Narragansett Bay. It was a measure of the love Charlie's friends had for him that somehow the dock would be sledge hammered back into the muddy bottom every spring in time for the boaters to reclaim their places along it. His little marina was his kingdom.

At the beginning of the dock teetering on the bank was his shack, or his office as he liked to call it. Inside was a small counter with a glass front and behind the glass were a few boxes of candy bars and gum, a box or two of lead fishing weights, drop lines of tarred line wound around frames in the shape of tic-tac-toe grids, spools of line and whatever small random items Charlie had no real interest in selling. A few plugs, jigs, and packs of hooks hung the plank walls. It wasn't even close to being a tackle shop; Charlie just kept a few fishing items around (at highly inflated prices) for the boaters who might need a thing or two before they headed out to Watch Hill Reef for striped bass or to drift off Misquamicut for fluke. In one corner of the shack was a soda cooler with bottles suspended in icy water off racks that would allow you to pull out a bottle of impossibly cold and delicious Coke or birch beer when a dime was inserted. Two or three chairs sat along one wall, along with an Army surplus cot that Charlie used from time to time when his leg was acting up. In corners were random fishing rods, oars, gaffs, lobster pot buoys, anchors. More rods hung from the rafters, along with lengths of hemp line and an old life ring with "CGC Spencer" stenciled on the side. The cutter Spencer was the ship on which Charlie had served during the war, and I found out much later that the ship had engaged and sunk a German U-boat. He never spoke of it.

In another corner was a small refrigerator that held bait and usually a few bottles of Piels or 'Gansett, expected offerings from the regulars when they would show up and sit for hours for hours swapping lies. The place smelled of tarred lines, over-ripe bait, and cigarette and pipe smoke, at least until Charlie would swing open the back window. He could then sit behind his counter and carry on a conversation with whomever walked in the front door while keeping an eye on his kingdom out back. Whenever my dad, little brother and I came for a visit he would reach under the counter and pull out a couple of Hershey bars and hand them over with a wink. To a ten year-old and his little brother the shack and the marina were places where men were men, a few forbidden words could be heard and sometimes a huge striped bass or two would be lying on the dock as an angler washed down his boat. Dad would settle in for a beer and a smoke in the shack while my brother and I would head for the end of the dock with our drop lines in hopes of catching a flatfish or two and we thought the whole experience was pretty close to heaven.

Charlie had never married and when he wasn't at his "office" he was at his home a few miles away, a small place in need of paint next to an old printing press factory in downtown Pawcatuck. His sister checked in on him every day and drove him to the marina because he had neither the ability to drive with his bad leg nor even the remotest interest in automobiles. His world was boats.

Kids instinctively know when an adult loves them and will suffer their antics and with Charlie there was never a question. He taught us how to rig up our lines, bait the hooks so the cunners had a hard time pulling off the sandworms and how to gently bounce the weight on the bottom. No slack in that line, boys, he would say. Those flats will just kiss those worms and you gotta be ready! Dad would stand in the background, smiling. Although he took us fishing many times in the family skiff, my father's sense of humor never allowed him to take fishing seriously enough to be much help when it came to the basics of angling. But he could sense that we took it very seriously indeed, and in Charlie he had a teacher we would listen to. Fishermen are born, not created, I remember Charlie saying, and this was proven with my brother and I.  Brother John soon gave up the sport but for a few summers I could not wait to go to Charlie's marina and talk to him and the fishermen who kept their boats there. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to connect with one of the stripers I saw in their fish boxes and the fluke they caught could hardly be contained in their buckets as they walked up the dock, making the little flatfish I caught seem puny.

At the very end of the dock was a larger boat, probably only a 26-footer or so but by far the biggest craft at the marina. Nailed into the big piling at the end of the dock were the tails of three swordfish the skipper of that boat had landed. I never saw any of the whole fish but judging by the size of the tails on the piling and the rods on the boat I knew this was major league fishing. The skipper was not exactly unfriendly but he was never inclined to say much to a wide-eyed youngster with a drop line in his hand. This just made him seem all the more mysterious, and he was clearly an expert in the world of fishing, or so it seemed. I asked Charlie about him and he chuckled, saying something about fishermen who don't know what they don't know, which made no sense to me but I knew better than to dig deeper into whatever conflict might be there. Charlie dispensed his wisdom in small doses and often it took quite some time for the dose to have the desired effect.

Sometime in the summer of my 11th year, dad and I headed over to the marina one Saturday morning and after the customary greetings Charlie reached up into the rafters and took down a fishing rod and reel. Here you go, boy, he said, no more drop lines for you. Time to learn how to use a proper rod and reel. I found out years later that this moment had been planned for some time, that my parents had wanted to buy me a rod on my previous birthday but Charlie had asked them to hold off so he could present me with my first saltwater set-up. I don't recall what kind of rod it was but the reel was a basic Penn conventional with a clicker and star drag. Charlie had loaded it with Dacron line and it was rigged with a weight clip and a snelled hook, and I thought it was the best present I'd ever received.

Over the next few visits Charlie gave me some basic instruction on how to operate my new set-up but my catch rate was less than impressive. Gone was the direct connection of a line between my fingers and the bite of a fish. Putting the reel in free spool and forgetting to keep my thumb on the spool resulted in wicked backlashes and tangled messes of Dacron. More than once I secretly longed for my drop lines and would glance over my shoulder to see Charlie and my dad watching from the window in the shack. But eventually I began catching flats again and even a few porgies, which were judged to be the next level of my fishing prowess by the anglers who kept their boats at Charlie's marina.

One Saturday morning that fall we drove into the dirt parking lot and noticed a few of the boat fishermen I had come to know gathered at the end of the dock. One was waving his arms and talking with a level of excitement that I hadn't seen before - I had learned that the best angling braggarts knew their claims were much more likely to be taken seriously if they were dropped in casual conversation. So this was surely some event of note and that turned out to be the case. Apparently two local commercial fishermen had been regularly setting a net off the end of Sandy Point and catching small stripers. The net was checked every morning, and on this day they had pulled it and found it all but destroyed. Huge, gaping holes were everywhere in it and the heavy twine had been shredded. Must have been a school of big blues, the excited fisherman said. They had to be huge, maybe twenty pounders! I know, I know, but I've heard they get that big

Bluefish! This was a beast that was almost as mythical as the swordfish whose tails decorated the piling. A few had been landed at the marina over the course of the past few summers but I was never there to witness them. Blues were a relative rarity at that time and almost exclusively caught by boat anglers in places like The Race and Plum Gut. Charlie had told me all about them though. Nasty damn fish, he said. They usually weigh only a couple pounds but keep your fingers away from the mouth, boy! They have teeth that will cut you to the bone and they like doin' it. That evil yellow eye will follow you as you reach down to take out the hook and SNAP, you're on the way to the doctor's office for a few stitches. They don't call 'em choppers for nothin'!

I took these words to heart and while I was fascinated by the possibility of catching something so malevolent I figured there was very little chance of this happening in the confines of my little world of fishing. The very idea of a 20-pound bluefish was downright scary. And only a couple miles away off the end of the river. Wow.

These thoughts were running around in my head as I baited up, sat down and dropped my offering to the bottom off the end of the dock. I knew enough by then to keep my thumb on the spool to avoid backlash and almost subconsciously engaged the reel after I felt the weight touch bottom. As I continued to listen to the nearby fishermen discuss how they might be able tackle huge bluefish I felt the rapid tap-tap of what I knew to be a porgy and set the hook. I began reeling it in but then three things happened in rapid succession. The rod was pulled down hard, the reel handle slipped from between the fingers on my right hand and the rod handle slipped through the palm of my left, and my rod plunged into the dark water below. Even after all these years, I remember what a small sound it made when it hit the water, just a little splash totally unworthy of the level of importance it held in my life.

I couldn't speak and stared at the now calm surface, then jumped to my feet and looked at the fishermen standing a few feet away. One of them had heard the little splash and immediately figured out what had just happened - and he actually grinned. It was the owner of the biggest boat, the swordfish slayer. Gotta learn to hold onto your rod, boy, he said. The others just stared at me. It was getting hard to see through the tears that I was unsuccessfully trying to hold back. Then I heard the familiar sound of Charlie clumping down the dock on his cane and steel-braced leg. The fishermen turned to him but I just stared at my Keds. A few long moments passed and finally Charlie said: You know kid, that water is only about eight feet deep at low tide. I have a big old grappling hook somewhere in the office, don't worry, we'll snag that rod.

I glanced at him for a second, expecting to see disgust or disdain in his face but there was none - none until he turned to the swordfisherman, who had lost his grin.

A few hours later we tried without success to locate my rod and reel, dragging the heavy grappling hook back and forth along the bottom below the dock. We heard that just before dark there was a blitz of huge bluefish at the mouth of the river, the first time I'd ever heard that word used to describe feeding fish. From all reports only a few were landed because the tackle that was being used just couldn't stand up to the fish and in fact the few that were landed weighed between 20 and 25 pounds. It was an event the locals talked about all winter and I wonder if it ever occurred again.

I spent the last few fishing days of the season using my old drop lines, but the thrill wasn't there. Charlie never said another word about the lost gear, and that Christmas my parents bought me a new combo, this one a real surf rod with a spinning reel. I used it a few times the next summer off Charlie's dock but by that point I'd discovered surfing at Weekapaug and Watch Hill and the fact that a surfboard gets much more notice from the opposite sex than a fishing rod. Fishing became an occasional pastime until I moved to Cape Cod a decade later and rediscovered the world beneath the waves that had temporarily seduced me.

I saw Charlie only rarely through my teenage years, usually at our house in Mystic when my dad would drive him over for a holiday gathering. At some point I heard he'd sold the marina and that the person who bought the property had torn down the office, closed the marina and was building a huge home on the upland property. Then in my sophomore year of college, dad called to say Charlie had passed away in his sleep. I couldn't ever remember my father sounding so sad. He was one of the last ones, dad said, one of the last of the real watermen around here. He'd seen sail, diesel and outboard, wood and fiberglass, and even when the sea had beaten him back to land he could never be that far away from it. Charlie did not suffer fools gladly, but he forgave foolish acts and knew how to pass on respect for the watery world and the creatures that dwell in it, as fine a legacy as an old waterman could hope for.

Gene Bourque