A Long Cast

Book excerpt: Our passions have a way of doing that for us: extending our lives In 1971, a father and son ventured out of their apartment in New Jersey to the Island of Martha' s Vineyard to try their hand at surfcasting. That trip began a life of Spring trips to the waters' s edge in search of bluefish and striped bass. Fifty years later, Mike Carotta takes readers along for thirty straight nights and days of fishing. This is not a How To book. It does not contain the secrets to a fantastic fishing career. Rather, hard fishing has a way of revealing lessons from the shore and the people who gather there— binding together strangers in conversations and gestures, failures and successes, new learnings, and, eventually, creating old friends. Through it all, more than fish are caught— and shared. The result is a profound collection of essays on life with some notes from the trade filtered in. Join Mike on his pilgrimage back to where the distance between heaven and earth gets a little thinner and the real "keepers" of the trip go far beyond the fish on the end of the line. "I am not a good surf fisherman. There are no helpful fishing hints here. This is a collection of recollection: stories of saltwater characters, occurrences, and conversations. Like stars in the night sky, they are best enjoyed when you get some distance from the lights of other stuff." &– Excerpt from A Long Cast