Rick Watson

Rick Watson

The guy was really cool. I realize what I am about to say is Fish Camp heresy, but in his time, Rick Watson was maybe even more cool than Brad Neat.

There, I said it.

When I took this picture with an Instamatic camera in the summer of 1971, it was a flat calm day in the Gulfstream. We had come into some schoolie dolphin that were chewing on anything we put in the water. The racket had attracted an enormous Hammerhead - enormous - which we spotted from several hundred yards away cruising in towards us just under the surface, its dorsal maybe three feet tall with a huge tail making lazy sweeps behind it. When it swam close alongside and then just underneath the 18 foot Woodson we were in, I remember involuntarily backing up from the gunwale. In this picture Watson had just put a fresh, squirmy little dolphin on the end of his 9/0 rig with a long wire leader and was waiting for the beast to circle up and hit it. The bite came a moment later, but the hook didn't set. Like we could have landed the thing, anyway. So you don't think I'm making this up, this is an insta-matic photo of the hammerhead's dorsel from about 200 feet away.

Everybody probably had someone who made a big impression on them when they passed through camp, and Watson made a big impression on me. This was the last summer that camp was using the Vaughan Villas next door, and Watson was the director of this group of us -- about 8 boats, 8 cabins, 8 counselors and 45 kids I think. It was also a time when we were doing logistically wild things: a two week session at camp consisted of 5 days of fishing and diving at Tavernier, then a 5 day trip by boat to the Dry Tortugas and back (a tall adventure for 13 year olds), then a night on Tavernier Key in an Army tent, followed by a traverse across Florida Bay to the hotel at Flamingo for two days. You felt like a G.I. marching across the continent, living out of a pillow case with a few pairs of cut-offs and tee-shirts inside.

Watson led this little fleet of campers around as a young adult, usually with nothing more than a soggy paper chart and a compass. He took his responsibilities seriously. He was a standout for having tons of smarts, and teaching you stuff. One day when it was pouring rain and we couldn't go anywhere, he spent the afternoon keeping us occupied (and fascinated) by dissecting a big lemon shark, and explaining what all of its body parts did.

So he was the first "grown up" I ever saw who was living the outside life because it was his choice. A conscious, deliberate choice by somebody clever enough to be doing whatever else he wanted to in the workaday world.
I never knew much about him other than he was from Atlanta and attending Emory University as maybe a pre-med student, where my sister also attended. A couple of years later one of his friends, Adrian Burley (sp?) came by camp and told me they had both attended the same high school I had in Atlanta: Briarcliff High School. I might be mistaken about that.
Brad Neat told me not too long ago that he thought Watson had been living the outside life out in Colorado, maybe Durango.
Most of my Fish Camp buddies never met Watson; he moved on. But if you have any Watson stories, post 'em. Maybe they'll find the guy and he'll check in a tell us what he's been doing the last 35 years or so. I bet it's interesting.