The pilothouse of David Kadison’s sport-fishing boat is a utilitarian place. The bulkheads (walls) are fiberglass, the windows framed in aluminum. In addition to the wheel and the navigation equipment, you find a bench with cushions, a three-burner propane stove (in which you can cook a whole chicken), refrigerator, sink, and a freezer full of lime-green Popsicles – and bait. The only extravagance is the mahogany console and teak deck. This is the command center for Poco Loco, a thirty-two-foot Mirage sport-fishing boat whose home port is Oak Bluffs harbor. In this pilothouse, Dave has taken Poco Loco everywhere in pursuit of game fish – Vineyard and Nantucket sounds, Cape Cod Bay, and even to the edge of the continental shelf. When the fishing is especially opportune and intense, his thirteen-year-old daughter Sarah and eleven-year-old son William go with him. (Talk with Dave for even just a few minutes, and you figure out that the fishing is never anything less than opportune and intense.)

Dave lives with his wife Chris and the kids in Vineyard Haven, but his business – Kadison Pool Plastering, which does about 1,000 pools a year all across New England – is in Concord. This means a lot of commuting. But Dave’s got his priorities straight.

He has jobs lined up at either end of the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. “People want me to show up at the end of September, the beginning of October,” he says with a laugh. “I tell them, ‘No – it’ll be after October 15, after the Derby is over.’”

The Kadisons started coming to the Vineyard in 1993, the year Sarah was born. Dave, a fresh-water fisherman before he moved here, took his wife and
infant daughter out to the point at Cape Pogue on Chappaquiddick in the family’s new Ford Explorer. He saw a school of albacore racing through the gut, watched the fishermen hook into a few, heard the lines screaming out, and that was it. He bought a small inboard-outboard fishing boat but quickly moved up to the Mirage so that he could take his young daughter and son as far as Provincetown and out to the Atlantis, Veach, and Hydrographer canyons – 130 miles south-southeast of the Vineyard – in pursuit of big-eye tuna, longfin albacore, and blue and white marlin.

William is already interested in the engine, and here in this pilothouse, he’s learned how to start it. Sarah is skilled at putting the boat in gear and chasing a fighting fish so that it can’t strip a reel of all its line. Both youngsters take seriously the responsibility to keep the pilothouse windows clean, and to scrub Poco Loco after a day on the water. (They’ve also caught their share of grand prizes in the junior division of the Derby. It drove William nuts last year when his big sister caught a false albacore two-hundredths of a pound heavier than his own best entry – and then the family boat had to go into the shop for the rest of the tournament.)

What the Kadison kids have learned in this rather spare, little pilothouse, and on this fishing boat, is as limitless as the idea of learning itself. Last summer, when she was twelve, Sarah passed the day-long Coast Guard boating-safety class, and now she can legally operate a boat up to sixty-five feet long all on her own, “which is totally crazy,” says Dave. “After she passed the class and got her certificate, she said, ‘Dad, where can I find a sixty-five-foot boat?!’ I said, ‘You are on your own.’”