Ever since I was a little girl, my father’s activity of choice to share with my brother and I has been going out on the ocean in his boats or going to the beach. But we have a strange relationship he and I…
I will always love him for bringing me into this world, but in all honesty (and Im sure my mother would agree) he really didnt do much in that area either…. My mother is the one who carried me in her belly and then delivered me into this world while he screwed around supposedly “helping a friend”… I am grateful to him for creating me but from the moment of creation until my adulthood he has not been A father to me. He is consequently my father biologically but he jumped around from one party to the next, one home to the next, one girlfriend to the next, one drug to the next… until finally settling on one lady who conveniently had her own children who he could re-do his failed parenting skills with. He faded away from our lives and into theirs without any explanation. He would pop up here and there at concerts, graduations, holidays…. sometimes she would come too… he would promise me that he would come by that weekend to take us to spend the night with him at his house but then he would never show up. I remember sitting at the gate at the end of our driveway waiting for him to show up for hours…
As an adult, now married and with my own children, our relationship is much different. He is a relatively good grandpa. He loves my children and spoils them when he can. He loves to tell them stories of when I was a little girl how I was “just like them”. We share many interests and have many things in common despite our disconnect. One of those things being a love for the beautiful Pacific Ocean.
One of the fondest memories I have of my father is when he would take us out on his boat. For years, in fact since he was a young teenager, he sailed on his own cadamaran right from the beach off Tamarak in Carlsbad. As a little girl we would ski off the back of his motor boat and my brother would sleep up under the front of the boat as we flew over the waves. A few years later he had a large catamaran with giant sails… now that thing he had fun with! I remember how hard he worked to get the sails up and keep them in the right direction. I remember freaking out whenever my side of the boat would lift high in the air, then he would laugh switch the sail and then life the opposite side high over my head while practically sinking my end in the water… then when we would fly over the waves we would get soaking wet bc the water would just splash up through the net beneath us. We always came back to the dock full of smiles and soaking wet. We would fish for anything and everything; my favorite was trolling for sharks and chopping up the chum to dump into the water. I know it’s gross but I wasn’t your typical little girl. The thrill of hunting for sharks was so exciting! As I got older I would go out during lobster season with him as well, pulling up traps in the middle of the night with flashlights all bundled up in the fog… Those are the memories I cherish and those are the things I love the most about taking my kids to go see him when he puts his boat on the water.
Today was special because the girls were up north with my in-laws and I was able to go out with just Kaelob. He was SO excited to go fishing and look for dolphins. So off we went to meet Grandpa at the harbor.
*Having FUN with new settings on my new phone’s Camera*
Discussing wind breaks and swells 🙂
Watching SO intensly the tip of his pole so he could know IMMEDIATELY when he had a fish on the line!!
yep… he was having fun.
we had a friend following us… I wonder why hehe
He wasnt so sure about the ” Lizard Fish” he caught because it had BIG pointy teeth… He was so excited when he pulled it out of the water until he saw the teeth, he about jumped off the boat lol.
Because I didnt have the girls to have to hold onto and entertain.. THIS is What I got to do the ENTIRE time…
His next fish he caught was called a “Shovel Head Sand Shark”… he was SO excited that he caught a shark but again wanted to be fffaaarrrr away from it once it was out of the water.
This picture below cracks me up though, the fish’s face looks so trippy…
The fish had swallowed the hook so Grandpa had to perform ‘surgery’ to get it out before tossing it back into the sea…
THE PROUD FISHERMAN:
We HAD to stop by the seal’s and “say” hello.
then we rode the waves around searching for dolphins…
after we pulled back into the harbor he looked like this:
And then before getting in the car, on our way off the dock we stopped to feed the crabs. When I was younger I would catch the crabs with musscles I pulled from underneath the dock or little pieces of hot dog tied in fishing wire. In high school my best friend and I filled up a paint bucket, shocking the fishermen on the jetty by doing the same thing… it seems only natural to teach my children the same trick. Unfortunately we didnt have any fishing line with us but Kaelob was content feeding them his crackers. He squealed with delight as crabs came running out from the rocks and carried away whole cheetos or battled each other for a piece of pretzel.
and then we visited the anchor memorial dedicated to those lost at sea… spending a moment to honor my father’s best friend who died at sea almost thirty years ago…
