Part 5: Ever hopeful

Unless you own your own cottage, there are downsides to a Sandy Pond vacation. It’s not easy to get a line on a good rental. You have to know somebody who knows somebody. That’s how we sometimes had to operate. The one year I took a classified ad at face value we wound up in the cottage from hell.

What made the disaster complete was another downside – Lake Ontario-influenced weather, always an uncertainty. I know, I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. It may well rain as many days as not, so you'd better have a dry, comfortable cottage for refuge. Actually, in such a cottage, a rainy day can be rewarding – if you've packed several games and books. Some years I'd do more reading during our Sandy Pond vacation than I'd do for the other 50 weeks.

Also be warned that Lake Ontario is considered the most polluted of the five Great Lakes. That’s right, Lake Erie no longer holds the title. The pollution isn’t visible; Lake Ontario still has its good looks. And to my knowledge, the stretch along the eastern shore, which includes Sandy Pond, has always been considered safe for swimming.

However, were my father still alive and fishing, he’d think twice about eating those 36 sunfish, assuming he could catch that many these days.

One obnoxious Great Lakes beach problem has been addressed. That problem: alewives, a species of sardine-like fish that 50 years ago became much, much too plentiful for its food supply. Zillions would starve and die each year during the early weeks of summer. The bodies piled up on the beaches, leaving an unsightly mess and a stench that would gag a pig.

(The worst cases were along the shore of Lake Michigan near Chicago where it could have – but didn’t – inspire a Dr. Seuss book, Seven Inches of Alewives.)

Much has changed in the past 20 years. Pacific salmon, imported to feed on alewives and attract fishermen, finally have had an impact. Scientists also successfully attacked the lamprey (an eel), a notorious killer of lake trout and other fish. Trout were re-introduced and are thriving, thanks in part to a diet that includes alewives.

Nature is now more in balance; there’s food enough for all of the fish, even, it seems, the downsized population of alewives. For more than 10 years the Lake Ontario beaches were relatively free of dead fish, though I've been told that during the early summer of 2002 they were noticeable once again, though nowhere near the eyesore they were in the '50s and '60s.

Even during those bad years there was a way to avoid the unpleasantness, at least at Sandy Pond: delay the vacation until August, by which time the fish bodies and the stench miraculously disappeared.

Unfortunately, the first Mrs. Major was introduced to Sandy Pond in July.

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THE KIDS and I returned to Sandy Pond in 1976, and a year later we were joined by the second Mrs. Major. Through my cousin Loretta, whom I hadn’t seen in years, we met a family who owned a trailer on Green Point, a peninsula that juts into the pond three miles north of the cottages our family used to rent.

The trailer was lovely, but our timing was terrible. North Pond, storm-battered for three winters, was angry. Its channel was wide and wild, a long stretch of the sand barrier was underwater, allowing the lake to crash the pond.

The only boats for rent at Green Point Marina were small, flat-bottomed things, shaped like oversized banana-split tubs. We rented one and attached a 5-1/2-horse outboard motor borrowed from an uncle. We could have made better time with an eggbeater. Because of the lake's influence, the pond was unusually rough. Going to the beach in our rented boat was like sailing the ocean in a Tupperware bowl. I think we completed the trip once. Other days we either turned back or made the trip by car, which defeated a main purpose of our new location.

The fishing was disappointing, even nasty. Just when we were convinced there was no point continuing, we’d get a message from the pond that said, “It’s your fault, you know. You’d be catching a ton if you weren’t so inept.”

Like the time we anchored in sheltered water east of tiny Carl Island, off Green Point, where we quickly caught three of the biggest yellow perch I’d ever seen.

More, we said.

Replied the pond: Only if you display a little skill and something more than nightcrawlers dangling from a hook.

Not even a nibble for the rest of the day.

Later in the week my son Jeff stared down at the water from the pier where our boat was tied. Suddenly there it was, a fish this long (hold your arms three-feet apart). He ran to the cottage to get his pole. You could hear the pond laugh.

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THE NEXT YEAR, when we returned to the south end of North Sandy, across the street from the “big” cottage, my wife Linda made an excellent suggestion. We rented a canoe, with which we explored the pond in ways I’d never done before, especially through that area I referred to as the Georgia swamp.

Jeff spotted some turtles and decided he'd net one. He tried and failed several times. Then Linda tried – and a competition was underway. Finally Jeff came up with a painted turtle in our small fishing net – obscured by five pounds of seaweed. Oh, yes, and an empty Budweiser can. (A few years later we began fishing a small pond in Rhode Island where turtles were so numerous they were annoying. They'd follow almost any bait back to the boat, while the fish sat back and watched.)

Once more the pond mocked us, this time while Linda was flailing away with the net during the turtle hunt. Suddenly she came upon a large fish apparently stymied by a cattail maze. The fish, of course, found a path to freedom, but once again we had our hopes raised that if we fished this spot we'd finally catch The Big One.

Finally, we did. More accurately, my son Jeff and my brother-in-law did. Each hooked a fish I’d never seen before. The locals referred to it as a ling, but I later learned it is more widely known as a bowfin, the sole surviving species of an ancient fish family.

Bowfins (below) are a much-despised garbage fish. They eat almost anything and thrive where other species curl up and die.

Compared with other Pond fish, they’re huge (up to two-feet in length), but big-boned and taste like something that would be the main course only on Fear Factor. Even Emeril couldn't kick this meal up a notch.

But all that mattered to Fred and Jeff was the size, 2-to-4 pounds. They felt much larger because bowfins are fierce fighters, and on that basis are well-worth the effort involved in making the catch. At least, that’s what Jeff tells me. I never had the chance to find out. Jeff, meanwhile, became our bowfin master, catching at least one during every vacation thereafter.

By the way, ling is only one of the bowfin's aliases. Among the others: mudfish, dogfish, grindle and spottail grindle. Perhaps because of its reputation – and I'm not making this up – it’s also called . . . a lawyer.

Bowfins are easy to identify. The clue is one of its aliases – spottail grindle. There is a prominent black spot on every bowfin, just in front of its rounded tail; on males that spot is rimmed in bright orange. (This is not to be confused with the red drum – aka channel bass or redfish – a coastal fish that also has a large black spot at the base of its tail.)

A few years after our first encounter, I saw a bowfin in a 10-gallon tank at the home of a family I was visiting. There was no mistaking it. That rounded tail is almost as distinctive as the spot. The people told me they bought it at a New England pet store where the owner – perhaps innocently – told them it was a rare Japanese fish.

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