Wrapped Up with Ritchie

Wrapped Up with Ritchie

MY FRIEND RITCHIE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A KLUTZ. A GOOD 

guy, but a genuine klutz.

One day we were fishing off the breakwater at Charleston, Rhode Island, a half-hour after the tide had turned. He was throwing tin on a light rig and hooked up.

“I’m on!” Ritchie shouted. The rest of us reeled in so he’d have room to play the fish. It was a pretty good striper, about 40 pounds, and Ritchie brought it to gaff in about 15 minutes. When he reached down to lift the fish by the gills, he somehow managed to run the lure’s treble hook through the meat of his hand between the thumb and forefinger. I cut the line, freed the lure from the fish and was going to push the hook the rest of the way through Ritchie’s hand so I could snip the barb and back it out, but he would have none of that. “I’ll let them do it at the emergency room,” he stated. So off he went to the hospital in New London, some 30 miles away, refusing to allow any of us to drive him. In those days, the bridge over the Thames River between Groton and New London had a toll. Ritchie drove up to the toll booth and, with the same hand the lure hung from, reached out to pay his dime. He snagged the toll taker’s hand with the other end of the plug! Unable to exit either the car or the toll booth, the men remained hooked together until the state cops arrived to separate them. Like I said, Ritchie’s a klutz. But we were fishing buddies all the same. Back in 1960, we used to make good money by selling stripers to local restaurants. The fish started running thick and heavy in the first week of October. Since we were in high school we could only go fishing in the late afternoons or on weekends. One Friday afternoon we loaded our gear aboard the 18-foot Thompson Offshore my old man kept at Marster’s Dock in New London and headed down the river. I steered toward a hole just to the northeast of Bartlett’s Reef, about three miles west of the river mouth. We considered going to the Race, which might have held a lot more fish, but the rip there gets