Gone Fishing: Blog On

It was pioneering filmmaker Robert Altman who described his love of fishing in these words: “You put that line in the water and you don’t know what’s on the other end. Your imagination is under there.”

In the same spirit, the Gazette is casting online with a derby blog, fishing for and feeding the anglers’ imagination.

The Vineyard’s annual Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby needs no explanation for Gazette readers. Blog, for anyone still unsure, is the ungainly combination of the words Web, as in World Wide Web, and log, as in diary. The Gazette’s derby blog is a space where folks who love the derby can catch up online in real time, even as they are sneaking one by one to secret spots at all hours of the day and night.

So between fishing and weighing in your catch, log on to mvgazette.com. You’ll find there the Gazette’s tide charts, renowned for their accuracy. The names of each day’s leaders and the size of their fish are there, too, as is all the thoughtful reporting of derby news from the printed edition of the newspaper.

Joining all that online are more derby stories and reflections, as calming or stirred up as the individuals who write them, in the Gazette derby blog — and you are invited to be a part of it. Send us a photo of your boat or your bitten-off bait; tell us why you fish; make us laugh with a bad fishing joke or a tall fish tale; send whatever feedback you have. See it posted online and you can almost hear your friends off-Island read it and weep for being somewhere else.

Already you can debate insiders’ tips (the best fishing Sunday was on the Chappaquiddick side of the Norton Point Beach opening) and comment on their concerns (is it going to be a tough derby for shore anglers?) or just have a laugh (how do the gulls get past the fillet master?). Meanwhile Gazette staff members will continue to share their knowledge and personalities there, adding daily (or more often) eyewitness reports. Because as someone else said, a bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work.