By Jack Roland Costello
There’s an art to throwing a cast net. A quiet, stubborn kind of art. One part rhythm, one part faith, and the rest just muscle memory. You don’t just heave it, you load it. The hand line in one hand, the lead line coiled in the other, the netting bunched against your side, and one edge gripped between your teeth like some barefoot castaway unbridled by cultural limitations and conventional restraints. The swivel and brail lines whisper tension through the mesh, and the weights at the bottom wait like anchors for their cue. You spin like a storm building on the horizon, let the net fly, and if you’re lucky, it fans out in the air like a floating crown and lands in the water with a soft slap, clean and wide. And all that grace? Earned barefoot, on sun-baked stone, over years of tangled failures and half-right throws.
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
We were fishing off a tangle of rocks, my dad, two brothers, and me. The lines weren’t giving us much to brag about, but no one seemed to care. We’d brought beer, and that was always the real anchor. Our drink of choice: Samichlaus, a dark, Austrian lager brewed once a year, strong enough to make one reconsider a second (usually). Fourteen-percent ABV, twenty bucks a four-pack, or less if you know someone morally ambiguous.
Riley, my ceremonious brother, had swiped my mother’s Yeti for the occasion. Said it kept his beer colder longer. I drink mine fast enough to solve that problem, but Riley has always been more judicious. At this point, Yetis are less cup, more modern chalice.
The Cult of Samichlaus
Samichlaus didn’t just appear in our fridge one day; it arrived with a story. About a year ago, my dad overheard a guy at the Moose Lodge talking about a stash that had “fallen off a truck.” Since Samichlaus comes in glass bottles, that phrasing raised questions. But not for him. He tracked the guy to his garage, exchanged some cash, and came home with what I can only describe as a lifetime supply. Cases have since appeared in our fridge, the garage, the outdoor bar. I’m not convinced there aren’t more buried around the property.
He once told me, completely serious, “The best time to drink a Samichlaus is early in the morning. Your taste buds are more receptive.” He said it like a man who’d tested the theory and found the truth of the matter.
Back on the rocks, the lines stayed quiet. Riley, now a couple of Samichlaus deep, asked to try the cast net with the confidence of a man whose theory might not hold up in practice. Usually, he moves with languid grace, like our household cat, Zulu, elegant in a way that feels accidental. I figured he’d be better than me, even without experience.
I hadn’t accounted for the beer.
The First Cast
He loaded the net like a pro, bit down on the edge, and spun like a man possessed. For one beautiful moment, it was perfect.
Then he punted the Yeti.
It launched like a silver cannonball, spinning, skipping once, then sinking with the finality of something never coming back. Riley froze mid-pose. My father didn’t even flinch. He took a sip and said Riley should probably switch to water or Miller Lite (they amount to the same thing I suppose).
The cast itself? Somewhere between modern art and maritime disaster. The net landed in a heap. Nothing caught, unless you count the moment.
We stayed a while longer. The sun dipped. The tide crept in. No one seemed in a hurry. We didn’t catch anything worth keeping. But something else happened. Something that cost nothing and somehow became permanent.
Postscript: What Sinks, Stays with us
The fish barely showed. The net landed gracelessly. And the Yeti now belongs to the sea. Riley says it was an accident. I think it was performance art.
It’s always like that, isn’t it? You go out hoping for fish and come back with a story you’ll be telling until someone stops inviting you to things. No great revelation. No moral. Just the quiet fact that on some rock, in the middle of nowhere, your brother tried to be impressive and instead punted something that wasn’t his into the ocean.
And still, it was perfect in its own way.
There are moments that cost nothing and somehow become permanent. They sneak up on you. No one announces them. You don’t frame them or caption them or call anyone to say it just happened. You just stand there holding a bottle, watching something absurd unfold, and without realizing it, you memorize the whole thing.
That’s the kind of day it was.
No fish, but we laughed. The Yeti’s gone, but the memory isn’t. The cast was a disaster, but it still made the kind of mark that good casts rarely do.
And honestly, it’s probably best Riley didn’t catch anything; he’d have found a way to throw that in the bay too.
