The harbor slumbers at sunup like an ageless debutante still asleep in her sequined party dress, each murmuring wave a measured breath, kelp and seaweed splayed across the gravel beach like strands of hair on a feather pillow.

Herons ankle-deep in the outgoing tide scan the shallows for tiny scuttling crab. A quartet of bickering crows joust for a single crushed clam on the rip-rap bulkhead.

The beach houses ringing the harbor are still curtained, dark. A tan dog sits on a painted wooden deck, seeing nothing, expecting nothing.

Scattering the calm, my two young sons and I drag our blue rowboat to the water’s edge, a trio of mismatched pallbearers grunting through gritted teeth, accompanied by the grinding clatter of the aluminum hull scraping on the gravel.

Our water-logged canvas shoes squeak as we load our boat with a pair of battered oars, tangled fishing rods, the tackle box I got for my 12th birthday, my youngest boy’s orange school backpack crammed with snacks and steel water bottles and a couple of packages of frozen bait.

While I ferry our garage-sale Sea King outboard and five gallons of two-stroke gas across the asphalt road to the beach, the boys wait sleepily in the boat at the water’s edge, struck numb by daylight, yawning and shivering in the remains of morning mist. They warm their hands between dirty, summer-scarred shins, orange life-vests strapped clumsily across their chests amid the flotsam of oars and rods and tackle.

My oldest boy rows us out beyond the eelgrass while I fiddle with the outboard. After a couple of pulls the Sea King coughs and roars to life. I point our bow south along the shoreline, past the peninsula, into the outer harbor and finally into the open bay.

I cut the motor and we drift, suddenly silent, our boat bobbing in the wake of distant container ships and a lone party sled cutting serpentine arcs in the gray-green water, blasting Smash Mouth out of apparently waterproof speakers while a bikini-clad woman with goose-bumps fetches refreshments from a tiny cabin.

I pull out some hooks and begin tying them on nylon lines. Compared to the Mayan blood-sacrifice of a live worm writhing in agony impaled on a barbed hook, cutting plugs of frozen herring feels more like making lunch. I adorn a piece of thawed herring with a dab of hi-viz-green Powerbait and tie on a giant license-plate-sized spinning spoon for good measure.

After three or possibly four minutes without a single fish leaping into our boat, we bust out the snacks. The boys have granola and milk in paper bowls and we polish off the bananas, saving the peanut-butter filled pretzel bites for the trip back. The boys crunch their granola thoughtfully as the waves lap against the side of the boat.

In the distance another boat cuts an exuberant wake on a course straight toward us, and as it hums into focus it’s clear that it is two fish and game wardens in a welded aluminum patrol boat. As they pull alongside they shape-shift imperceptibly — good cop, bad cop.

The good warden remains at the helm, friendly and grinning in sunglasses, while the other warden grabs a three-foot long boat hook and squats in a captain’s chair for an interrogation, slapping the boat hook rhythmically into his palm, perhaps in case we decide that making trouble sounds like a good idea.

Our registration is out of date, we have no boat horn, no flares. Oh, look, no fire extinguisher, either. The warden wonders aloud in a sing-song voice what we could possibly offer in our defense that might dissuade him from writing citations costing hundreds of dollars. Slap, slap, slap, the boat hook against his palm.

After a few seconds of uneasy silence, the clearly more sensible warden intercedes on our behalf, cheerfully advising us to get our registration renewed today and pick up a boat horn while we’re at it. And with a wave and a vague sort of goodbye, furiously churning hundreds of gallons of green water with their twin 300-horse Yamahas, they’re gone.

We don’t catch a thing. I dump the last of our bait, and as we pull away several fish jump out of the water chasing the herring. We cruise into the harbor an hour late, and I see my wife Maria on our front lawn, distractedly scanning the horizon for our boat as women have done for centuries, praying for safe return when their men have gone to sea.

— Kevin Pottinger and his wife Maria live on Vashon with their four children.