If you good folks will indulge me, I'd like to recount what has become a legend within the Clouzer household.
It was one of those dog days of mid-summer in the late 1890's when my grandfather, the inventor of the Clouzer fly, was working his way back home to the family homestead in what was then called Waquoit City. He had been toiling in the vast cranapple fields of East Teaticket but that day there was a special bounce in his step. For it was payday and Gramps was literally bogged down with paydirt. He had been working a lot of overtime and it made him nervous to think that he was actually carrying $4.75 in the pocket of his homemade rubber suit.
Well octagenarians will be octagenarians and Gramps was no exception. Although he passed it up every day on his way home, Gramps just couldn't resist the blazing candlelight and gayly decorated windows of the town's most infamous house of spirited libation, the Herring Runs. With the extra loot in his slimy pocket, Gramps felt like a giddy 65 year old as he burst through the swinging doors of the Runs.
Back then, Gramps had a well celebrated drinking problem and although he had started out with beer it was less than an half hour before he was sucking down his favorite schapps. He drank with such verocity that it frightened the otherwise fearless regulars who began to distance themselves from the increasingly hostile, rubber clad German. Fights were beginning to break out when Billie, a cute but asthmatic young boy, flung through the doors histerically yelling at the top of his lung, "Tuna! Tuna! There's giants in the haba!"
Despite his intoxication, Gramps led the charge to the harbor and immediately vomited upon beholding the spectacle before him. There, stretched from one end of the harbor to the other, was a school of giant, 600 pound tuna feasting on a recent hatch of harbor seal pups. What happened next was a matter of much debate for decades to follow. As Gramps remembers, someone handed him a Penn Squidder and he instinctively began looking for bait. Finding none, he wrestled young Billie to the ground and, in a matter of seconds, had him wrappped up in the end of the line and hurling toward the center of the school of giants. Gramps began to work Billie in what is now known as a "walk the dog" action. Twitch, twitch, twitch........KABAM! The drag on the old Squidder was screaming as the man eating giant bolted for the Vinyad. Gramps strained with all his might to slow the massive tuna but to no avail. It was actually pulling him toward the end of the pier, foot by painful foot. It
was an epic struggle. After what seemed like hours, Gramps was actually beginning to gain a little on the brute until he hit the puddle of schnapps-laden stomach content he had previously deposited on the pier. His rubber boots gave up what fragile traction they were providing and Gramps literally flew off the pier and into the water. The horrified crowd fished Gramps out of the harbor, washed off his boots and returned to the Runs to toast the "one that got away".