On a sunny Thursday afternoon in late September Robert Hibbs stands on a steel girder at the edge of the Ardmore pier, hooting at a bunch of salmon. Hibbs is 33, a roofer by trade. At Ardmore he prefers to go by Babe Wolf. Friends of his who fish at Ardmore include Burnout, J.J., Jim, Blair, and No Neck.
“Get the net, Sam!”
“How ’bout that? Yeah.” He laughs. “Honey, what’s the matter with you? You lost your nerve.” He stares at the water. “He’s still out there.”
A little later Babe’s still trolling for the elusive fish. “Man, I’ve been fishin’ with night crawlers all the time. I should’ve been on one already. I’ve got to drag a little lighter. I probably ripped his mouth wide open. Ripped his jaw, ripped it pretty hard. I’ve got a 12-pound test, so I can hog ’em right up on the pier. Damn. I didn’t know they were that active for the lures. They’ve been catching chinook off of Montrose horseshoe.” He sees a big fat fish swim by. “Oh, damn! There comes a nice motherfucker there, boy. Whoooo! Goddamn, he’s gotta be 13. Goddamn.”
Babe, who’s been fishing at Ardmore for 25 years, knows its currents as well as anyone. “This pier here is really productive,” he says. “I’ve sat here and limited out five times in one day. When your salmon season’s here you catch spring coho. I caught 111 in one month.”
“My buddy hooked a lady out here one day. She had men’s underwear on. We stood here for about 20 minutes. I couldn’t take no more of it, man. This friend of mine, he was fishin’ like I am right now, and he hooked into her and dragged her. She was out here. The tide took her all the way down here, man. She was down because she was decomposed already. When they decompose they don’t float no more. Unbelievable. He quit fishin’ for a while. He quit fishin’ for about three weeks.”
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“It’s true,” says Babe. “I was out of a job this one year, and I did nothin’ but fish. We were actually sellin’ ’em. We’d go down Bryn Mawr, and the Vietnamese and the Chinese store owners and stuff, they’d buy ’em right off us. I got this guy by my house, I’ll sell him the big ones for like 20 bucks. Sell him the spring coho, five bucks apiece–and I catch 40 or 50 at a time. It’s against the law to do that. I don’t eat ’em a lot, because they’re outta Lake Michigan. But I take my share. They say it’s not good to eat any one thing at all. Like beef–if you ate beef every day it’d be bad for you. I heard about people that are over 80, and all they ate were avocados or something off-the-wall like that. Or people surviving out in the ocean for six months on papayas. Yogurt. Yogurt’s got a big name now, too.”
