For years I thought I just had bad luck fishing from the surf. Must be the wrong bait, or I’m not casting far enough, so I’d wade out chest deep and heave my line as far as I could, landing almost always on the sandbar, which is the exact wrong place to fish. In order to catch a fish, particularly from the shore, you need to know how to “read the beach.” When you see most people at the beach with a couple poles in the water, they’re likely not catching much, because they don’t know how to read the beach.
Fish like structure and variation and depth, things that are initially unseen on the surface of the water. Knowing how to read the beach based on what you see in the water is crucial. Knowing how to read the beach is the difference between enjoying a Bob Ross painting and being with him while he paints it.
Walking out onto the beach, or any shoreline, is just like walking into a gallery. It’s all art, it’s all beauty, but when you can interpret what you’re seeing, the painting comes alive for you. When you can read the beach, you can see where the fish might be, and where they definitely aren’t.
Typically, when you look out from the beach you see a line of breaking waves. Most travel miles before reaching the sandbar, which causes them to break. Once they break, they create a trough, a portion of the surf that’s slightly deeper. The water then regathers in much smaller waves and breaks again onto the shore. Because the trough is a little deeper, this is the highway fish use to travel. Cuts are breaks in the sandbar that link the trough to the deeper water past the breakers. This is where you can really catch some fish, because you have variation in structure on each side of the cut, and you have the link to the deeper water past the breakers—a cut is a fish gold mine.
These aren’t easy to see from the surface until you recognize the change in the wave pattern. Waves typically break on the sandbar, ten to forty yards off the shore. The bottom of the wave slows down when it hits the sandbar while the top of the wave rises up and crashes.
Because waves break in response to meeting the sandbar, a cut will not have any breaking waves. So when you see a line of breaking waves, and then an area with no consistent waves, you’ve found a cut. These are also where riptides can form. Riptides are terrible for swimmers, but tremendous for fishing.
In a river you might examine the movement of the water to find the strong current. Fish are economical, so they don’t stay in the strongest current if they don’t have to. Often they’re just outside the main current, watching for the smaller things that wash down so they can dart in, grab a quick bite to eat, and head back to slower water. In a pond you might look for structure like fallen trees or lily pads that provide cover for smaller baitfish.
Knowing how to read the beach, or any body of water, can help you find places where the fish are, and puts you in relationship with the whole grand thing—you’re able to see a little deeper into the entire ecosystem, and a larger picture emerges.
Reading that picture means you don’t have to stay in one spot, in fact you shouldn’t. Even if a spot looks fishy, if they’re not there, move on to the next fishy spot. But sometimes you don’t have the flexibility to move locations, so you have to just fish in the one spot you have access to whether the fish are biting or not. Those spots can become sacred storehouses of memories.
Living across from the Potomac River was a gift that continues to unfold as I grow older. We lived just down the road from where Broad Run Creek empties into a sliver of the Potomac that runs on our side of Seldon’s island. We called this smaller portion of the Potomac “the little river,” and it ran twenty to thirty yards wide depending on the season.
What we called “the point,” was the stretch of land on the bank where Broad Run Creek and the little river meet. Most of the year it was an idyllic spot like any other place where a creek rolls into a river. A few small fish here and there, sycamores stretching over the water. But in the fall the water was like a loaded cannon ready to explode.
As the water cools in autumn, baitfish move up into the shallower areas of creeks and rivers. Bigger fish follow their food into those same waters. Crappie, or sac-au-lait if you’re in Louisiana, are a “good eatin’ fish,” with tasty, white, flaky meat. They can be found in rivers and lakes all over the country, but particularly in the South and the Midwest. In those days they were plentiful at the point, and we would spend long evenings out there as dusk turned to night, catching crappie. The point was a place apart, a sleepy little fishing spot just down the street in our semi-rural neighborhood. Few people knew about it, but those who did became special to us.
For a few years we didn’t know the point existed. Dad and I would fish for catfish down the other end of the street at Bowman’s dock, a cement dock owned by Arlis Bowman. Then one day a handyman was working in our house and he and Dad got started talking about fishing. His name was Rufus, and he said there were crappie just down the road at the point and offered to take Dad down there and show him how to catch them. You have to understand that this is a pretty rare thing—most fishermen are extremely helpful, and they want to talk fishing, but they jealously guard their favorite spots. But Rufus was different. He was older, in his seventies even then, and sharing this spot with a younger man and his son was the right thing to do. We got on real well with Rufus.
Rufus had stormed the beach at Normandy. He said he hopped out of the Higgins boat and the water was over his head as he sank to the bottom with all his gear. “I just started walking until I could breathe,” he said. He wasn’t shy about fishing next to you either. Like fishing on the pier, there’s an etiquette to fishing on the bank, and you don’t crowd someone when they’re fishing. You especially don’t crowd them when they’re catching fish. It just isn’t proper. But Rufus would get right up on your elbow and cast right where you were casting. He always took them home, and we figured he needed what he was catching.
When I was in college Dad called to tell me Rufus had died. We told some old stories about him and admired the life of a man who lived simply, fished a lot, and worked until he died. The last time I ever spoke to him, a few days before I went off the college, he grabbed me by the elbow in between casts and looked me dead in the eye. “Listen to me, son. When you’ve got time, fish.” He wanted his ashes spread at the point, so Dad somberly carried them to the edge of the water and the places we’d stand to fish and spread Rufus out on the bank. A couple weeks later Dad went down to the point to fish. The problem was, Rufus was still lying there all over the bank. The fishing was particularly good that day, so Dad kept having to say, “scuse me, Rufus,” as he walked back and forth on the bank.
There were a few other regular characters at the point. I wasn’t there the day Charlie Taylor showed up, but I couldn’t believe it when Dad told me. Charlie Taylor was a Hall of Fame wide receiver for the Washington Redskins in the seventies, and his legacy was still in the air in those days. “Charlie Taylor, like the Redskins Charlie Taylor??” “Yeah,” Dad said casually. Dad always had a way of being normal around famous people. He was just so comfortable and confident in his skin that he didn’t need to put on airs or fawn over people. He just treated them like they were normal, which is what they wanted anyway. I am very much not this way. Dad and Charlie struck up a friendship and he eventually gave Charlie a key to the gate of the point, and Charlie would come down more often. Once he was in a little one-man boat, a few sheets to the wind, when he got a bite.
He was standing up and yanked back so hard on the pole that he fell over backwards, capsized the boat and lost all his gear. Turns out Hall of Famers are human too.
My favorite regular at the point was the postman. We never knew his name, he just called himself the postman, so that’s what we called him. He was African American and would sometimes bring his white girlfriend. This was the early nineties, and racial attitudes were different then. It seemed to us that the point was a place they could be free from the eyes of the white world and just be lovers who loved to fish. When the postman found out Dad was a schoolteacher, he started calling Dad “the teacher,” and he had a running commentary on Dad’s fishing abilities. “When the teacher pulls his mess outta the water, you best pull your mess out of the water because there ain’t no fish around anymore.” Sometimes the postman would show me how to tie a knot or show me some of his lures. It was the first time I’d spent any quality time with an older African American man, outside of sports. It was only later that I realized how rare that kind of relationship was.
Few people living in our country today would say that the great experiment of a pluralistic, racially mixed society is going well. It is clear, and always has been, that people of all stripes struggle to understand what it’s like to be someone else. It is a fundamental element of the human condition: I know clearly what it’s like to be me, and I deeply want you to understand me. But I am not so sure I want to know what it’s like to be you with equal fervor, partly because I am afraid I might have to adjust my own perspective. I want you to walk a mile in my shoes, but when it’s time for me to put on your shoes, they somehow just don’t fit my feet.
Reprinted with permission from Catching Hope: The Hidden Spiritual Wisdom of Fishing by Pete Nunnally, copyright © 2026 Broadleaf Books.
