TIGHT LINES
DON'T CRY FOR ME, NANTUCKET
with Andrew Spencer
As many of you are no doubt well aware - and for those few of you left who haven't yet been subjected to my gloating - I'm down in Florida, still on vacation, living it up in the warm and sunny weather. One admirer of my work - my favorite builder extraordinaire (you know who you are, Mr. Walsh) - took the opportunity to text message me recently with a few choice epithets regarding, among other things, my true purpose for living. But

know that deep down Tom is really concerned about my own well-being and he just wants me to be happy and comfortable in my young middle age. It's touching, really. In fact, it's moments like this that can really bring a tear to your eye.

And speaking of tears, I read recently that the saline content of the average human tear is nine parts per thousand. What that means, exactly, is that there are nine grams of salt per one liter of human tears. Don't ask me who the heartbroken fool was who was hired to cry a liter of tears; just trust me on this one. You people up there in the frozen tundra of Nantucket are near the saltier end of oceans - the North Atlantic is pretty high in salinity, at about 38 parts per thousand.

No, that's not the Creature of the Lake Worth Lagoon but our salty writer, Andrew.

For water to officially qualify as "saltwater," it has to contain at least 30 parts per thousand salt. Over 50 parts per thousand and it qualifies as "brine," which is what you soak a turkey in before cooking it if you watch the Food Network specials before Thanksgiving, but that's another story altogether. When it's less than 30 parts per thousand

but over .5 parts per thousand), it's labeled "brackish," and then things start to get interesting. And yes, technically, tears qualify as brackish water, but

digress. Just remember the whole brackish water thing for a second.

Now back to Palm Beach. Palm Beach, Florida, is, in actuality, an island. It's a distinctly separate place from West Palm Beach, an issue more than a few people have confused over the years. West Palm is on the mainland; Palm Beach is its very own little barrier island with its own municipal services and such. It's connected to West Palm by a series of bridges (cue the "bridge to Hyannis" jokes), and those bridges go over Lake Worth, part of the Atlantic Intracoastal and the "Lago" in Donald Trump's casa de campo, Mar-a-Lago.

Okay, so we've got the concept of brackish water and the concept of Palm Beach as an island separated from West Palm by Lake Worth. Now, hold on to your hats, because here comes the part where we tie it all together: Lake Worth is open to the sea at various inlets up and down the east coast of southern Florida, and that means that the lake itself is brackish water. And don't let go of those hats just yet, because we've got plenty of sources of brackish water on Nantucket, too.

And some of those brackish bodies of water are pretty darn good striper fishing in the early spring.

In Palm Beach, they call that a segue. They just clench their jaws and point their chins a little more than most people do when they call it that.

It's a verifiable fact, friends and neighbors. Those fun little ponds where a lot of us while away many an hour catching perch offer some pretty good schoolie striper action come April after the ponds are opened to the sea. The idea behind pond openings is to cleanse out the ecosystem within the ponds by exchanging stagnant water with cleaner sea water. According to one study I read, when the ponds are opened in the spring - kind of an aquatic spring cleaning - the salinity levels are up around the 26-27 parts per thousand levels. And, in no small coincidence, the Chesapeake Bay - the ancestral home to our favorite little striped fish - maintains a salinity level close to that near the mouth of the Bay. So, in other words, Sesachacha Pond and the Chesapeake Bay have got similar levels of salt content, which means that the striped bass will thrive in both.

When you're fishing down in Lake Worth, it's totally not out of the question - I've actually done it myself, so I can vouch for this - to catch a Florida largemouth bass, a saltwater catfish and a bluefish, all in the same fishing trip. And just in case anybody out there is keeping score at home, that's one fish that's found "exclusively" in fresh water and two that are found "exclusively" in saltwater. The catch is that all three of them are swimming around in water that's neither.

So don't neglect those ponds when the schoolies show up this spring. The first time I heard somebody tell me they caught a striper out of Sesachacha, I thought they were pulling more than my leg. But it's true, kids. It's not out of the question, so don't neglect the ponds.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go find a nice postcard for Tom Walsh. He's been so supportive during this tough time of my vacation, and it's the least I can do for him.

Tight lines. I