Let me start by saying that my dad has always loved fishing. We’re talking fanatic-level fishing since he was a young boy growing up in New Jersey. To this day, at 70, he fishes every week….at home in Charlotte, here in the flats, the Outer Banks, Northern Michigan, and out West.

My mom, however, was not lover of fishing. I can still remember her face when my dad would drive away almost every Saturday of my junior high and high school career, loading up the boat and heading to Lake St. Clair in Michigan. Half of her expression was exasperation of losing her honey-do man for the day, the other half happiness at seeing her husband leave to go do something he loved.

There exist few pictures of my mom fishing that I have come across. I think I have seen one of her fishing on their honeymoon on Cape Cod in 1966. Maybe the stray one from a vacation in Northern Michigan. The one, however, that brings the biggest smile to my heart and that of my family’s is the day she showed my dad up. A day that he will never live down.

We were in Kona, Hawaii in 1997 and they went out with some other couples to fish marlin. It was a quiet day on the Pacific. I didn’t happen to be on the boat, but I know my mom was certainly more interested in entertaining the guests, introducing people to one another, generally being a social butterfly. The crew convinced the ladies to give it a try, assigning each a rod of which to be “in charge”.   She patiently took in the sights as they trolled around and around.  All of the sudden, my mom’s rod got a hit. She took the rod, they sat her in the fighting chair, attached the rod and the fight began. The marlin greyhounded across the ocean surface for a hundred yards or so, then dove down deep. It was a long fight and Mom tired over the next hour. The mate helped her out a bit, but my dad never jumped in to take his turn at battling the fish. He stood by and rooted her on.

They returned to our hotel late in the day. Mom bounded in with a gigantic smile across her face. Dad hung back, stopping to chat. His face was equally proud and humbled. My sister and I jumped up from our lounge chairs to hear the news. Mom had landed a 287.5 pound marlin that day, the largest catch at the marina that day!  There were no digital cameras to record the moment. We had to wait to see the pictures after they had been developed the old fashioned way. We listened to the fish tale over and over that vacation and for years to come.

Mom passed away after many long illnesses in November 2007. It is a fish story that will be told for many years.

-Karen Szlosek