John Griswold took his SAT exams dressed in fishing waders. His college-bound classmates looked at him funny, but he didn’t care. It was the opening day of trout fishing in 1971 and nothing was going to keep him off the water.
“I still have the 12-foot Jon boat my father gave me for high school graduation,” he said, smiling.
On Saturday morning, Griswold, now 56 and a construction inspector for the state Department of Transportation, was among the die-hards who cast their lines into Brickyard Pond on the opening day of trout fishing season.
More than 100 ponds and streams around Rhode Island have been stocked with some 80,000 hatchery-raised brook, brown and rainbow trout weighing, on average, 1½ pounds, according to the DEM’s Division of Fish & Wildlife.
Griswold wasn’t having much luck, though. But he’d made fast friends with a bearded electrical company repairman who had already caught two rainbow trout.
Word got out he was luring the trout with “cheese.”
A guy in a boat yelled over to the cheese-man, Von Ray, who was casting off a rock on the pond’s banks.
You’re using cheese?
Make that “floating cheese,” Ray said. It’s what they called it when he was a kid. He held up a small plastic container to show a visitor. The label read “Nitro Bait,” and it boasted pheromone technology.
“It’s not for human consumption,” he said.
The bait is neon yellow and green and soft, like putty. Ray held up his fishing rod and showed how he had molded a fingernail-sized piece around a small hook to form a ball. He’d threaded a slip sinker onto his fishing line, to give it weight, so the bait floats above it.
The “floating cheese” may not have been the only reason for his success. Ray had also gone online and checked the fishing forecast. The weather channel, he said, lets you punch in your location and ZIP code and up popped the forecast for Brickyard Pond.
He’d caught the two trout between 7 and 8 a.m., which made sense, he said, because the forecast said that the peak times were from 7 to 8 a.m., and 7 to 8 p.m.
The fishing forecast, he said, is like the tides. “Fish feed when the moon is due south.”
Ray held up his catch so Griswold could measure them. One was 14 inches; the other 16 inches.
A few yards away, a father-and-son team sat in a canoe untangling their fishing line. Erick Dickervitz, 49, a reporter for the East Bay News who writes for the Bristol Phoenix, and his son, Keith, 14, had been out since 6 a.m. His dad says he had to wake him up before dawn, but it wasn’t hard.
“On any given school day it takes five or six attempts to get him out of bed,” he said. “I went in once and told him: Are you ready to go fish? He was pretty much out of bed.”
The sky glowed pink as their canoe slid into the pond. Fog rose off the water, like clouds.
“Even if you don’t catch anything,” Dickervitz said, “you can’t beat a day like this. It’s just a good time …”
Griswold, who 40 years ago wore his waders to his SAT exam, as of Saturday afternoon hadn’t caught a single trout. But he didn’t mind.
“It’s not catching the fish,” he said, “it’s being outdoors. The fish are just a bonus.”
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