When the Fog Lifted

Dawn arrived as a charcoal smudge across the Tuckerton marshes. My frog lure rattled in the tackle box with each step through the pluff mud that smelled of rotten eggs and childhood adventures. By the third collapsed blue crab shell crunching underfoot, I questioned why I'd worn neoprene waders in this 80% humidity.

'Should've stayed in bed,' I muttered, watching a shrimp boat's running lights dissolve into the pea soup fog. The first cast plopped behind a spartina grass island where tidal currents made perfect ambush spots. Nothing. By the tenth retrieve, my braided line had sawed a raw groove in my index finger.

The egrets laughed at me. I know they did - three of them perched on a channel marker did that head-bobbing thing as my spinnerbait got snagged...again. When the sun burned through at 9:17 AM (I checked my waterlogged watch), the entire marsh exhaled glittering mist. That's when I saw them: nervous water dimples moving toward my position like aquatic Morse code.

My next cast landed softer than a heron's feather. The frog hadn't twitched twice before the explosion - a proper, muddy-Lake-Okeechobee-style eruption. Seventeen pounds of furious redfish came airborne, gills flared like a Spanish galleon's sails. It took all 30lb-test line and my last clean shirt to beach that copper-sided beast.

As I released him, the departing fish's tail slap left a perfect V-shaped bruise on my shin. I'll wear it like a sailor's tattoo until next tide.