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POKE A POLE IN A HOLE

© Louis Bignami

At dusk fog hides the shore. Kelp swishes against waders. It's easy to imagine Angelo wanders still over his favorite rocky reef. A gnarled and bent Italian, he died by the side of a favorite tide pool at age 87. Nobody was surprised when they found a sack full of rockfish and an empty bottle of home-made wine next to his body. For, like the Coastoan Indians who planned their days to the ebb and flow of the tide, Angelo lived off the shore. He would appear from the mists with his poke pole on one shoulder and a sack of fish. Unknown, probably unloved, his claim to attention was the fact he always caught fish We first meet when, like many Bay Area Italians, I learned to poke pole off the reef at Bolinas north of San Francisco Bay. Like most, I wasn't impressed with Angelo. A tiny man, he moved slowly even then, but he never slipped on the slick rock and kelp that mock "non-skid" wading shoes. His tackle, a twelve foot long bamboo poke pole with a rusted cyclone fencing wire extension 16 inches long tipped with a size 2 hook baited with mussel meat, didn't compare with my new collapsible fiberglass model. The torn gunny sack he had "improved" with a tarred hemp rope shoulder strap lacked the convenience of my paperboy's bags. Still, as happened many times over the nearly twenty years we shared the reefs, his tattered sack bulged with more and bigger fish and eels than I ever managed. 쳌 A quiet man, who I later found knew Dante as well as the label on the screw-top Gallo bottles he favored, he offered his help that first day. So I took my first rockfish and eels out of the far from obvious slits, slots and holes in the rock he showed me. Perhaps Angelo died at the right time. Poke poling fades as today's fishermen often buys technology, rather than learning expertise. Poke poling isn't glamorous, merely effective. Poke polers aren't impressed with gear; you can rig up for less than five dollars and glean bait from the rocks. Poke poling is only the most effective way to take fish off reefs and around shore kelp. Even better, it's as near home as a rocky shore. I've poked up rockfish -- even the odd lobster -- off the Maine coast, and prodded my poke pole into holes in the reef from Mexico to British Columbia to Prince Rupert with solid results.