Captain Ned Small
My father was an engineer who devoted his life to designing fishing reels. They were mostly spinng reels, he was born in 1900 and he was there when the spinning reel made it's debut on the fishing scene, just after WW2. As a small child, I was his guinea pig, just like I am now with Mark and this website. He would tinker in the shop for ages until he arrived at a prototype for a new reel, then he would send me out to the driveway with the new reel rigged on an old fashioned, (new fashioned in those days,) fiberglass rod and a rubber casting plug, and I would break it. If the design had a weakness I would find it, I'd catch hell for it, but at the same time I would find the weak spots in the design and it wouldn't take me very long, I have an irksome talent for finding the flaws in any system.
I loved those early reels, I still have a few of his prototypes and some of the original patents, and at least one of his designs, produced by Finor is on display at the IGFA museum in Dania. He was fascinated by the 'bennet arm,' as opposed to the movable bail that we are so familiar with today and devoted his efforts to making a reel that had no vulnerable moving parts in the line pickup system. Some of you are probably young enough to remember when Ted Williams was with Sears Roebuck, back in the late fifties and early sixties, you might even remember the Ted Williams spinning reel they sold back then, that reel was designed by my father, collaborating with Ted, my father developed the prototype and Sears produced it, if you can find one today you'll recognize it by Ted's signature and my father's favorite bennet arm line pickup device.
So we lived on Cape Cod and I grew up back in the day when stripers were abundant. When I was sixteen I had a 1949 Willy's that we used to prowl the beaches with, this was before the National Seashore or any of that, before all the rules, (like the Park is going toward today,) and I'll tell you about one day me an' the Old Man went fishing.
It was during a nor'easter, rain and sand in your face like bullets, we used to think that was the best time to catch stripers in the surf. It was on the north shore, at the mouth of a creek that is still famous today, we had to drive seven miles across the dunes to get to it. We used surf rods, spinners, with a Kastmaster spoon, the one with the blue chevrons on one side, and we attached a bucktail trailer behind it with a short length of 30# mono. This was before anyone knew anything about catch and release fishing and we came home heros that day. We each caught two stripers each, on every cast until we just didn't want anymore. And we didn't release any of them. We killed them all and piled them up in the back of the jeep. It's a wonder we didn't break an axle trying to get that little buggy back to Hyannis, but we did it, we delivered fresh stripers to all our neighbors, friends and relatives and sold the rest at the local market.
Times have certainly changed and so have I, I witnessed the decline of striper fishing on Cape Cod first hand, and although, in retrospect I recognize that the oblivious joy we took in catching those fish would, in the future, be emblematic of the lack of regulation and overharvest of stripers on Cape Cod and everywhere else in their range, I have to tell ya,' that was just one day that was pure, fishin' joy!
At the same time my brother Alan and I would go out again at night, we fished the north shore and the south, we fished all the tidal estuaries we could reasonably get to before daylight, (this might have just a little bit to do with my failure to finish high school, and, ..um, the ability to dance on my own feet,) and we used spinning rods, small plugs, the 'Atom,' pencil poppers and the like, Stan Gibbs made wooden 
plugs back then and we used those too.
We had a creek on the south shore that we hit every night, I won't name it, it's still crackin' under the right conditions. There were hundreds of stripers in that creek just blasting away, it'd be pitch black, there was a subtle glow from a highway light, about a thousand yards away that gave off just enough light to let you know you were in a frenzy of feeding fish but not enough to let you know what was actually going on, those were the nights we learned to tie the improved clinch, the only knot we knew, by feel, in the dark. We just couldn't get those fish to take. We tried everything, every spinning lure we could come up with and could not catch one of these stripers.
After several days of this we brought a giant flashlight with us one night and shined it into the water. There were hundreds of grass shrimp adrift in the current, a phenomena we hadn't seen in the darkness and the fish were obviously keyed in and selective on that 'hatch.'
The next night, after scrambling together a 'fly,' (we didn't know anything about flies, we were just trying to kill one of these stripers,) made out of the hair from my brother's bird dog, we tied a dropper to an atom, tied the 'fly,' on the end of it, and caught one on the very first cast! And then another and another. The rest is history.
The next day we were ordering components from the Old Herters Catalog, building our own fly rods, buying feathers and chenille, vises and kits and trying to figure out how you do this fly fishing thing, noone, at that time knew how to do it, let alone anything about it, noone did it. Alan and I just plowed ahead, we made our own rods and flies and caught the hell out of those fish! I wish you could have been there, we felt like pioneers and it was beautiful! If you hooked a big one you had to follow it in your rubber waders down the shore to gain an advantage.
Now I fish the Everglades, the Last Best Place, and I don't kill fish at all, be it redfish, snook or tarpon, we're going to let them all go. It's been a hard learned lesson, I wish I could go back and let those fish, from forty years ago, go free, at the same time, catch and release fishing is the future of our sport. I'm not going to stop fishing. I'm going to continue to fish and to let them all go. You can not stop with me.
Today we (I,) fish entirely for the sport of it, we want a nice photograph of the fish we catch and that's it, we let them all go. I wish all the guides in Everglades National Park would do this.
So get down here, let's talk about Old Times, let's try and catch a beautiful fish, it's easy, you just spend endless hours on my foredeck while I push you toward your rondezvous with destiny, don't give up, I won't either. I'll take your picture releasing it, you can add it to your life list, with photo' documentation. How bad can that be?