N.B. For more recent Just Angling columns, i.e. 2006, go to the Horry Independent website. Just type in Horry Independent http://www. horryindependent.com/ on your favorite search engine.
Just Angling for January 6, 2000
By Donald Millus
New Year’s Day Beautiful As Usual
What are you—or your neighbors—going to do with all those freeze-dried beans, bottled water, ammunition, and that new generator bought in anticipation of year 2000 New Year’s day problems? Bring ‘em back to the store for a refund or save them for our next hurricane? I admit we did stock up on beer and milk, but no more than for an ordinary weekend. How disappointing for television and the daily press that there was no mass disaster to help sell advertising. I went fishing on New Year’s Day and my no-computer-chip 12-year-old Johnson 25 ran better than ever.
New Year’s Day occasionally comes up super nice weather-wise. The new millennium beginning worked out just that way. (By the way, have you noticed that some publications—not this one—are inserting [sic!] whenever anyone from the President to a new mother in Loris uses "millennium" as an adjective? If they’re consistent they should use [sic!] when someone refers to a "baseball game" or to "sex education," two of thousands of times when a noun by popular usage becomes an adjective. But if they want to improve people’s usage, perhaps they should insert [sic!] when a fan says "Clemson was real [sic!] sorry" in its bowl game when what they should have said was "really sorry" or just plain "stunk." I say that as someone who roots for Clemson all the time, except when they play Coastal or when they are football favorites against the Gamecocks—I root for the underdog in that game.)
Anyway, New Year’s dinner consisted of "Hoppin’ John," collards, and big fat sautéed shrimp, plus steamed clams and clam broth. I dug the clams at low tide in Murrells Inlet, but staying up to midnight to usher in the new everything with a few glasses of Asti Spumante, a gift, not a purchase, did not allow me to be out at dawn to dig enough clams for the neighbors. (They got even by putting the bargain Christmas lights they had purchased on December 26th on my palmetto tree. I will keep them plugged in until the owner reclaims them, but I kind of like the flashing beachwear store effect.)
In the Inlet two New Year’s Day outdoorsmen parked their 17-foot boat at a creekmouth to look for oysters. I told them they had to get up earlier and go way up the creek, something you can’t do with a big center console designed for offshore depths. They asked me about the theory of keyholing for clams, which I admitted, has some merit in the right place at dead low tide. Meanwhile I felt fortunate to dig three-dozen Atlantic hard-shell clams out of the mud, the largest half-dozen for the freezer and chowder and the rest for the steamer pot seasoned with oregano and thyme—say "time" says my French instructor, Madame Gourmet.
At the jetties a woman boated a skate and another angler said he caught a winter trout on his first cast. Another gentleman told me he has taken a solitary spotted seatrout on New Year’s Eve while my neighbors were getting the bargain lights ready just in case I didn’t bring home sufficient fish or clams to suit them. Neither MirrOlures nor Cotee grubs produced a strike. It still was a beautiful day not to watch bowl games which are mostly boring without a playoff system, although I will watch Clemson or even USC, if the latter is ever again invited to a bowl game.