Dan Davis sleeps with the fishes.
But unlike Luca Brasi, the Godfather's favorite enforcer, Davis has a story with a happy ending: a state record.
On Nov. 15, while on a marathon fishing weekend, Davis pulled from the Assateague surf a record Atlantic rockfish that broke the 1994 mark by almost 3 pounds.
Davis lives in Littlestown, Pa., just above Taneytown. He lives on - I'm not making this up - Fish and Game Road.
He learned to surf fish in North Carolina, but when transportation became an issue, he took up fishing on Assateague.
"I have an old, old truck and Assateague is a lot closer. I'd rather break down near Assateague than somewhere in North Carolina," he says.
He showed up for fishing at 3 a.m. that Friday. He and friends Ron Evans and Evan Evans set up shop near the Virginia line to take advantage of some productive sloughs and holes. Within an hour, Davis had his first fish, a 38-inch, 25-pounder.
When the grass moved in with the tide, the party picked up and moved north to "The Bullpen," a productive spot this season, where other anglers had scored big fish just under the state record of 45 pounds, 5 ounces.
Just after 5 p.m., 14 hours after Davis first put his line in the water ("People say I'm a little crazy," he confides. You think?), he felt a tug.
Using a circle hook baited with bunker, Davis let the fish set the hook before he set the drag.
"It just took off," he says. "The way it hit and tore all the string off, I thought it was a shark."
After nearly a half-hour of jockeying, he brought the fish into the surf.
"It was dark. It was pretty tense," he says.
Then the hard work began. The anglers couldn't find a state-certified scale open on Friday night.
Two employees at Harbor Tackle in Ocean City worked the phones to no avail. So Davis took his fish back to the beach for the night. Like Brasi before him, he slept with the fish.
"We were kind of nervous because we were afraid of losing weight with the fish out of water for so long," Davis says.
The next morning, Dale Timmons, the publisher of Ocean City's weekly fishing bible, The Coastal Fisherman, met Davis at Ake Marine to make everything official: 48.2 pounds, 49.25 inches long, 29-inch girth.
Everything was perfect. Except for one thing.
"I didn't have a camera," says Davis, laughing. "Two weeks earlier, I caught a 39-pound rockfish and I figured I had caught the biggest fish I was ever going to catch."
Once again, Timmons to the rescue.
Davis filleted his record-setter and is considering having a taxidermist make a fiberglass replica.
"I probably will, but at $16 an inch that's $800 without the mount," says the 34-year-old pool maintenance man. "There needs to be smaller state records."
Davis' catch was the fifth record broken this year. Anglers also claimed the biggest Spanish mackerel, Atlantic spadefish, yellowfin tuna and Bay crappie.
But those records aren't a record. DNR says one year - no one is quite sure which one - anglers set eight marks.
Davis is back out there this weekend, hoping to better his mark.
"There's some really big fish out there," says the new champion. "I'll be surprised if this doesn't get broken again this year."
Deer hunt outlook
With five days to go before the opening of the modern firearms season, it's time for our annual deer prediction from DNR buckmaster Doug Hotton.
Gazing into his camo crystal ball from his tree stand just outside Salisbury, "Fearless" Hotton boldly says this year's modern firearms season will be more like two years ago than last year.
"Weather pulled a sneaky one last year. First it was foggy, then it was rainy, then it was hot. We had it all," he says. "I'm guessing we'll be close to what it was in 2000-2001 - 46,000."
Last year, the total kill dropped 1 percent, mostly because of the miserable conditions during the two-week firearms season. Traditionally, 57 percent of the deer kills come during this time, but last year there was a 13 percent decline.
The herd is healthy, as is the ratio of bucks to does. No one seems to be shying away from hunting because of stories about chronic wasting disease, the fatal affliction that has infected animals in 11 states.
Once again, the quality areas will be the counties that form a horseshoe around the Chesapeake Bay, starting in Talbot and working west to Baltimore.
"Good-quality soil means good habitat and crops means good deer," Hotton says.
Long-range forecasts for Central Maryland on Saturday are calling for partly cloudy skies, with highs in the mid-40s and lows about 30.
Be safe and knock 'em dead, folks.
Sad note
One of the truly nice guys on Kent Island died on Nov. 16.
Joe Neyman, a retired mechanical contractor who lived on his boat and lived to fish, died of liver cancer. He was 61.
Neyman invented the Clip-It Leader Holder, and this time last year we sat and chatted about his pride and joy and the headaches of launching a product.
The bright green $5 gizmo was perfect for lone trollers or those who like to have spare leader rigged up and ready to go.
Neyman's daughter, Jill Popov, says she doesn't know what will happen to Clip-It now that its inventor is dead.
Here's hoping she finds a way to keep it on the market.