Baltimore: Encounters with amiable, quirky strangers

You never know around here, you just never know what’s going to turn up. Just last week, in a column about the things that make Baltimoreans happy, I wrote this: “We want that certain spontaneous wackiness that almost always happens when you open yourself to Baltimore and start conversations with amiable, quirky strangers.” Maybe not all readers understood what I meant by that. But what I meant by that is this guy, Bill Gillespie.

“They call me Eel,” he said, as his fishing kayak suddenly appeared at the boat launch in the Hammerman Area of Gunpowder State Park. I was there to conduct an interview with a fellow who sells portable sailboats — for a Sun column next week — when Eel suddenly emerged from the thick morning fog like some swamp creature. He was alone and he was wet. No one else appeared to be fishing, though it was hard to see anything with the fog. And Eel started talking before he landed his kayak.

“I just had one of the best days of fishing I ever had,” he said, still sitting on the kayak and assuming that two guys standing next to a sailboat would be interested in his adventure. “I caught about a 18-inch rockfish [on a white saltwater Gulp] and the biggest white perch I ever caught in here. Must have been a foot long, that’s big for a perch. I also caught a big catfish. … They call me Eel because, when I was 16 years old, during a period of high salinity in the bay, I caught an eel with big teeth, like a moray.”

And the name and legend stuck.

Anyway, I feel I made a new friend, right there on the spot — a retired mechanic for the U.S. Postal Service, a veteran of many fishing wars, the swamp king of Dundee Creek, Bill Gillespie, the one they call Eel, a fellow who will talk your ears off in a most congenial way, whether you’re ready or not.

I noticed that Bill had a lot of white letters on his black T-shirt, so, before departing, he pulled open his PFD, and there you go.