The last time I went fishing, I was 12 and accompanied by four other 12 year old girls. It was my friend Midi’s birthday party. She lived on this completely sick horse farm in Darien, and there was a pond across the street stocked with who knows what kind of fish. It’s safe to say these fish of indeterminate origin were unprepared for an encounter with a small army of pre-teen girls. It disappoints my oldest son to no end that I don’t remember more of this story, but this is roughly how it went. One of us was holding the fishing rod as the lure and hook dangled salaciously (well, to a fish, I guess) in the murky water. We were surprised flabbergasted rendered incapable of any kind of communication other than shrieking when we actually caught a fish.

I don’t remember how we got the fish off the hook. I want to say I was brave enough to grab its body and hold it still as I gently removed the hook from its mouth and tossed it back into the murky depths. But I’m pretty sure I’d be making that part up. I do remember the whole experience was enough to keep us up chattering into the late hours (it was a sleepover) as we played Titanic, a fun and extremely involved 1970s board game I never came across anywhere else besides Midi’s house.

When we were lifeguards, my friend Joe and I feared hearing one thing more than anything else: “Hey lifeguard, I’ve got a fish hook in my eye. I think I need some first aid.” We developed a Universal Symbol for Fish Hook in Eye (with your forefinger slightly curled, stick it just under your brow bone and hold on tight while making your most grotesque facial expression) and waited vigilantly for our first victim patient. Of course, we also spent our time waiting for a commercial airliner to fall out of the sky and (conveniently) into the Long Island Sound so we could see exactly how long it would take us to row out a few miles to grab all those survivors. I can safely attribute our love for the macabre to being bored out of our skulls.

Imagine my surprise at my fledgling love for fishing. We’ve gone three times in recent days, including a double header yesterday (late morning at Menemsha, sunset at South Beach). My husband and I seem to be getting a bit obsessive while the boys stay engaged for an hour and then move on to other wholesome activities like slipping off the rock jetty and into the channel. And, oh yea, I almost forgot… burying their private parts in the sand.

I should have seen the falling into the channel part coming from a mile away. All of those years on those sad little beaches, I was supposed to keep people off the jetties. A year or two in to the gig, after blowing the whistle and motioning for people to Get OFFFFFF the ROOOOCKS for the seven thousandth time, Joe yelled “FINE. TAP DANCE ON THE ROCKS. SEE IF I CARE” which I of course thought was about the funniest thing I had ever heard. And if your summer job kept you captive on a scorching hot stretch of gravel sand for eight hours a day with the same people day after day after day, by the time July 4th rolled around you would have found it funny too.

Anyway, it turns out keeping people off the rocks was a pretty clutch move. We were fishing, no, TAP DANCING on that jetty yesterday for quite some time. Those things are slippery, especially when a suddenly brave seven year old decides to start exploring every nook and slippery cranny of the rocks — including the nooks and crannies covered with algae.

Somehow we managed to convince the kid that surfcasting was the next logical step. Off we went to South Beach late in the afternoon. We caught no fish. But we saw yet another stellar sunset. The rest of the view was pretty good too.