Dingus and the Old Man

It was July of 1970 and I had been back from Viet Nam for about two weeks. I made the six hour drive from my house in Pennsylvania to the Maryland shore to see the Old Man. Ben Platt had practically raised me and although he was really no relation, I referred to him as my grandfather or just, the Old Man. I lived with an aunt near Tolchester Beach, but spent most of my time with her neighbor, Ben. He taught me honesty, integrity and what it took to be a decent person.

He also taught me about striper fishing. Ten years earlier, when I was fourteen and the Old Man was seventy-five, we would go out at night in his Old Town dinghy. He had bought her new in 1952, before he was the Old Man. He had named her Dingus, a character from an old Humphrey Bogart movie. She was nine feet of watertight beauty with the gunwales, deck and stern fashioned from mahogany with a white enameled canvas skin and a cotton rope bumper. She was a work of practicality with her pair of oar locks, davit eyes, towing ring and bilge keels. All of which the Old Man kept in great repair. We would load her up with two big coolers, one full of ice and a metal scoop and the other empty. As we caught fish we would throw them in the empty cooler and scoop ice on top. When that one was full, we’d start on the other. We also had two anchors, two buckets of eels, six rigged rods, a tackle box, a food and drink cooler, rain gear and anything else that we may have needed. The little dinghy would haul a load and then some. When we were full up with fish I was sure that we would sink. But the Old Man would just laugh at me and tell me not to worry. With a forty-nine inch beam, she could take it. We would use the three H.P. Johnson to go from one marina to another and switch to the oars inside. We’d toss live eels and hoot and holler and slap each other on the back as we fought the big fish to the boat. I don’t remember ever having a better time.
The Old Man was now Eighty-five and him and the dinghy both had a few cracks and chips but were still in pretty good shape and game for a fishing trip. That night, rowing back to the launch, I studied the face of the person that I cared more for than anyone else in the world. I could see the years in him now and that he was happy in this boat with me at the oars. The Fishing had been unbelievable. Ben had a long conversation with me that night and told me how he thought that we were doing something wrong and that this kind of fishing couldn’t last. The fishery wasn’t endless and something had to give. He was right. That was the last time that he killed a striper. He would go out in his little boat with a cup of coffee and watch the sun come up almost every morning but never fished again. When I would ask him why, he’d just smile and say that it could never be better than that balmy July night in ’70.
Now I am the Old Man in the little Old Town dinghy. Ben left her to me in his will. As I sit here watching the sun come up over Long Island Sound I think that it is time to pass Dingus along to someone else who cares for her as much as Ben and I. Someone who will make the kind of  memories that we made.