Young and Full of Fluff

I live near the waterfront in Jersey City, and there are several piers that are open to the public that I go for walks on. (One with an apartment building on it. Why would you live in an apartment building on a pier? It flooded during Sandy!) At pretty much all times, there are fishermen out there, usually with a bunch of rods propped against the railing. Sometimes people will also have crab pots. (There are signs saying not to clean fish on the pier. They are ignored.)

Earlier this week, I watched a few of them catch a 24’’ blue fish (best I can tell from my photos). So I started googling around to learn more about fishing in the Hudson. Turns out the mouth of the Hudson is great for fishing—it’s tidal, so you get salt and freshwater fish. You’re just not supposed to eat any of them.

Then I found this delightful messageboard, in which a poster has posted:

Back in August someone told me that the striper fishing was decent in this section of the Hudson so I hit it pretty good in the fall. Lots of white perch, ling, small stripers, a few blues, and a few keeper stripers. Many babes walk dogs and mingle around down here. I guess they think its cool because they can stare at Manhattan. Or watch hoofties like me fish and fly kites. … On Halloween weekend I dragged a 32 inch striper onto the train and took it back to Morristown. I wreaked of dead bunker and was pleased to share the smell with the snooty people travelling that way. Most of them weren't overly pleased with my fish stench or my beautiful fish, but their kids were thrilled. Kids are cool. They "get it".

If you are thinking of clicking through, be warned that I have excised some bits where he is more of a creep. I had to go look up what a “hooftie” is, but according to at least one of the internet definitions, it is “A Pennsylvania Dutch word for an imbecile or jackass.”

As this is a fishing board, everyone’s icon is a photo of them with presumably the largest fish they’ve ever caught. And one person’s just says, “I fish therefore I lie.” I am amused by how fast some of the things on this messageboard descend into words that look like English but have no meaning for me (I have technically fished only twice), ie, “I have also rigged a shad pattern rapala to stay in the current about 10 feet behind and above a weight and the juvenile stripers like this.” I think he is talking about…bait?

Further down in the thread, you can see that the OP is pretty consistent in what he is there for:

I like to fly a good size kite off of one of my Ugly Sticks with a salt striker reel spooled with 500 yards of Mr. Crappie 10 lb test mono. With a decent breeze the frickin kite is so high up it's practically ready for orbit. People wander by and ask who is flying the kite, they don't see the mono. This is a very good tactic by which I meet babes in between fish.

In any case, I had to share this total randominity of a 10-year-old post on an obscure fishing messageboard. Sometimes the internet giveth.