Gadabout looked like Colonel Saunders' (of chicken fame) brother, an older fellow of retirement age who simply traveled about doing what he loved best, fishing for anything and everything by whatever method, and filming it, good, bad, and indifferent. Nothing slick and gauranteed here. You saw what worked, and what didn't, but always with humor and novelty. Gadbout used a fly rod whenever it was advantageous to do so, and everything else the rest of the time. In this one show, he anchored his ROWBOAT in Woods Hole Harbour and, with a light spinning rod and popping plug, caught schoolie stripers up to 8 lbs. until his arm fell off and he ran out of film. All the next day, I poured over maps and charts and re-read every book and article I could find on stripers, and by the end of the week, my obsession was complete. I WOULD, if it killed me, catch a stiper on a fly rod. It seemed, lost in the obsession, that the gods would be pleased, the earth would spin more true, that somehow the universe would be more complete if I did so. In fact, it seemed I had an obligation (and somehow, in a less conscious way about a lot of things fishing-wise, still does). The process of information gathering, exactly where, when and how, was both puzzling and exciting. I learned that, from 1620 with the pilgrims landing until the present, there had never been a limit on the number of stripers one could catch in Massachusetts or the entire eastern seabord, only a 16" minimum size. And, or therefore, or as a result of that fact, there was no distinction between commercial and sports fisheries. All stripers, caught by any means, could be and were sold commercially to appear in fish markets and restaurants. It was a no-holds-barred fishery. Amazing. The exciting part was that, in 1968, the cyclical east coast population of stripers was reaching a peak unheard of and unseen in the prior forty years. There were literally millions of fish strung out from Maine to Chesapeake Bay during the summer. And I just wanted one! That winter I laid my plans. I managed to talk my way onto my return Christmas flight from Seattle with a one piece 9' Lamiglass 9 wt. rod blank. Needing a ferrule and other components, I looked in the yellow pages and found a small, one man shop selling custom rods and components just north of Boston close to the coast. The owner, a portly, smiling gentleman speaking the nearly unintelligble native, quadrangular Boston accent, sold mostly fluke rods and porgy rods and such, not a long rod in his shop. Fly rods? He knew nothing about them, but he did have ferrules, and in a dust covered box he found some guides, and finally peice-mealed together the necessities. The shop catered to North Shore locals, blue collar types who fished with bait in their backyard bays, for whom a cheap spinning rod and
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