Editorial

Time to Have Fun in the Sun

Are you having fun yet? Three weeks ago, we gave you 101 Ways to Have Fun — Bay Weekly’s Indispensable Guide to Summer on the Bay.

It’s no coincidence that so many of those ways to have fun lead to the water. Following our own advice, we’ve just spent a week in, on and around the water. And it has reminded us what is so special about this element that makes up so much of our earth.

We can report to you that it’s therapeutic to Take a 360-Degree View (Way 18). Your mind stretches out when you’re on the water, and good thoughts creep out of the closets and caverns of the brain, where they’ve been locked down.

Anything seems possible, and then you remember that that’s what discovery is all about: Going out on the water like Capt. John Smith or Lewis and Clark to see a new world or a world with new eyes. We wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t bring a stringer of new discoveries back from your summer days on the water.

Fishing — as we recommend in Ways 3, 12, 32 and 53 — is a fine way to clear the mind. As a friend of ours, Montana fly fishing guru Bud Lilly, advises:

“After time on the water, we are different people. We’re always changed. When we come back to our homes and jobs, our friends and family, we see the world in a fresh new way and we feel different. What worried us, no longer does. Fears have diminished. And the worst of matters are but distant memories and look so much less important in the greater scheme of things.”

We know what he means, and we think you will, too — which is another reason to respect the counsel of our own wise old fisherman, Bill Burton, that fishing is not just catching.

Like Burton, Bud Lilly talks about fishing as the “total experience” and advises that the pleasure you take from the natural world is greater when you know who, what, where and why. That’s why Way 99 advised you to Make a Friend of a Watershed. A little time on the Bay or one of its great or small tributaries, and you see that an oyster is more than a blob on a half-shell and why all of us need to take an interest in the fate of the blue crab.

These waters aren’t just reflecting surfaces, and they aren’t just here for us. They are living worlds whose logic it’s time we understand.

While you’re at it, take time to Discover What’s in a (Place) Name (Way 83). You may not know it, but we’re actors in some middle scene of a play, and we can’t do a very good job advancing the action if we don’t know what happened before we walked on stage.

Now is the time of our lives, and the Bay is beckoning. Go find out what she has to offer.

p.s. As well as greeting the sun (Way 1), oohing and aahing a collection of parades and fireworks displays (Way 6) on the weekend of July Fourth, we kept up our end by Throwing a Crab Feast (Ways 7 and 8), Discovering a Bay Beach (Way 2), Paddling the Bay (Way 52),Wetting a Fly (Way 53), Building a Sandcastle (Way 74) and Tasting Bay Water (Way 10). We expect you to match us or better.