fishing piers

weathered wood

This post was almost titled “weathered wood.” While modern concrete piers, such as the local St. Pete Pier (pictured below), Fort Desoto Pier, Skyway Bridge Pier, and Williams Fishing Pier, are wonderful and probably 100 times safer than wooden piers, and capable of extending farther out into the water, an old wooden pier has tons more mystique. Others feel the same. There’s even a “weathered wood” group on the photo sharing site, Flickr.

St. Pete Pier looking toward town

wooden piers engage the senses

Weathered wooden piers move ever so slightly under your feet and you feel connected to the motion of the waves that rock against the pier. As you approach the pier from a distance, down the shoreline, finally arriving in the shade of the pilings with the pier above you, then clambering up onto the pier and taking the long walk away from the safety of the shore out above the water, your fingers gently trailing against the worn wood railing, you enter the enchanted universe of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. When you finally reach the end of the pier under a sky threatening to storm, choppy waves smacking below, you know you are in a magical place. When you return, you will be changed.

Rod & Reel Pier, Anna Maria Island

City Pier, Anna Maria Island

fishing piers

There’s two wonderful piers down on Anna Maria Island, just off Bradenton, to the south of here, for just this kind of experience.

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One is the Rod & Reel Pier, pictured above (the left photo and the left pier on the aerial Google map), and another the City Pier (right photo, right pier on map), both with restaurants out at their ends. Closer to home, there’s the oddly named Dubai Long Pier in Redington Beach, pictured at the end of this article.

New York City piers (docks)

docks and boardwalks

A “dock,” I think of as a place to tie your boat. A dock may look like a pier, might be used for fishing like a pier, might even be called a pier (as are the New York City piers pictured above), but they’re not really “piers” are they? The same with boardwalks (wonderful as they are in their own right), such as the Madeira Beach John’s Pass boardwalk pictured below or another Florida favorite, the Daytona Beach Pier (its name says “pier” but it’s actually a boardwalk)–also see Under the Boardwalk.

John’s Pass Boardwalk, Madeira Beach, FL

gone fishin’

For more information on piers visit here, here, and here. For more local pier information visit one of these sites:

It’s the iconic image of a couple kids in overalls fishing off the end of an old weathered pier that gives the notion of fishing piers their emotional power. The cut fish drying in the sun on the wood of the pier, birds waiting to eat fish offal, ice chests at the ready for caught fish, and buckets of bait all speak freedom. It’s good, occasionally, to be able to just hang up a sign that says, “gone fishin’.”

Dubai Pier, Redington Beach, FL

While working on today’s post, I was listening to one of my favorite songs (and simply the very best performance of it), What A Wonderful World, performed by Louis Armstrong on the What A Wonderful World album. Have you ever tried buying single songs or albums from Amazon as mp3 instant downloads? It’s easy and addictive. You can hear similar music on free Internet radio’s “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” from Rochester, NY’s WXXI. (Don’t worry–you don’t have to be in Rochester to hear it; it’s “played” over the Internet wherever you are.) It’s also carried by many other NPR stations. That means you can find a number of different Internet radio “places” and times to listen to it by entering your zip code at Allegro.

Most images link to larger images.