Fishing Line

AWAITING A NIBBLE, Torre Mozzachio (left), and Jimmy Thomas dangle their fishing line from a pipe high above a creek near Grant Avenue and the Torresdale SEPTA station.

With temperatures back where they belong, local residents have been enjoying the outdoors with a vengeance. After an unforgettable winter, the sunshine has been a balm to all those who frequent Kelly Drive on wheels (bicycle or in-line) and on foot. It's also been welcomed by those who like to cast a fishing line - or create a tan line. And who can resist a little spring romance?

Put six scientists, a lawyer and a businessman in a room together and what do they come up with? One heck of a line. A fishing line, that is - one that is biodegradable. Jack Kearney, owner of the Brown Bear Bait Co. in Pittsburgh, has been selling biodegradable fishing bait for 25 years, so it makes sense that his new shtick would be to pitch environmentally correct fishing lines. "It's so distressing when you go fishing and you see these strangled ducks or dead fish floating in the water caught up in fishing lines left behind by careless fisherman," said Kearney, 67. "I've even heard stories of kids getting caught up, and nearly drowning, when they've gotten tangled in lines.

You're walking along the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, munching on a cheeseburger while the cool ocean breeze blows through your hair. Then, without warning, something swoops down over your shoulder. A large beak snatches your burger right out of your hand. Momentarily baffled, you wonder if you're in the middle of an Alfred Hitchcock flick, one perhaps titled "The Sea Gulls. " New Jersey beachgoers are finding that sea gulls are becoming so aggressive that they now know how to steal whole burgers out of people's hands or entire meals off their plates.

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER Some of you - including a sizable fraction of those who have had elective plastic surgery - may be suffering from delusions of imagined ugliness. A report in The American Journal of Psychiatry says "body dismorphic disorder" is characterized by obsession with imagined flaws such as an overly large nose, "devious-looking" eyebrows, a "stretched" mouth or undersized genitals. Severe depression, suicidal behavior, social withdrawal, repeated visits to plastic surgeons and "frequent mirror checking" are common symptoms.

Under yesterday's deep-blue sky, a woman calling herself Indigo sat on a bench in Logan Square, relishing the warm breezes and a large, yellow sun setting slowly behind the Franklin Institute. Indigo, 40, of West Philadelphia, spent Friday celebrating the arrival of spring with 150 others in a cold drizzle on Independence Mall. Yesterday's lush weather, she said, made up for that. The sun illuminating her face, Indigo was already looking ahead. "We might have our summer solstice celebration here," she said.

William H. Lyman 3d, 50, who never missed a chance to celebrate with fireworks and displays, died Wednesday of a heart attack at his home in Springfield, Delaware County. Mr. Lyman had had heart trouble since 1976. Early in 1977, and again three years ago, he underwent triple-bypass surgery. He had been doing well, said his wife, Linda. As always, Mr. Lyman had gone all out this year for Halloween and made his house the one where trick-or-treaters were very likely to get tricked before and after they collected their treats.

Beneath the placid surface of the Juniata River, south of here, dwells a fearsome predator. Lean and fast, it lurks around submerged rocks and sunken trees in wait for the helpless and the unsuspecting: the passing frog, the drowning mouse, the incautious snake. It attacks with great speed, generally out of hunger but also out of irritation, then devours and digests its victims. Its name is Micropterus dolomieui - a.k.a., the smallmouth bass. But at dawn Sunday morning, as fog hung in the hills and solitary egrets pranced the shoreline of the bass' murky realm, the shadow of a more ominous hunter darkened the river.

Matthew Adams of North Philadelphia is bound to the Schuylkill River by a strand of fishing line on a slender rod. "It's the peace of mind, to me," says Adams, angling for catfish near the Fairmount Dam. "I get away - just the peace of mind. " Adams, 39, has plenty of company this spring along the gently running Schuylkill in Philadelphia. From the river banks and from boats in mid-current, thousands of people each day heed the pull of the once heavily polluted Schuylkill that is now a prized center for recreation.

ATLANTA - Philadelphia composer Jennifer Higdon has perhaps never cast her net so wide. Always a seeker of extra-symphonic sounds, in the past she's trawled the aisles of Home Depot for trinkets that would give her orchestration an ethereal jingle. But for On a Wire , her new concerto premiered and recorded last week by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, she frequented sporting-goods stores for fishing line to rub across the strings of a piano, experimenting at length in her Spruce Street studio.

It was June 1967, and the 22-year-old woman with a toothy smile from West Chester was aboard a smelly fishing boat with 11 men eager to dive the offshore wreck of the famed Andrea Doria, 220 feet below the Atlantic. Evelyn Bartram Dudas didn't recover the best artifact - the ship's compass, which went to her future husband, John Dudas - but she returned from the trip a hero as the first woman to reach what is considered the Mount Everest of shipwrecks. It was a defining moment in the life of the now 64-year-old scuba entrepreneur, who owns a well-known Westtown dive shop, teaches, and leads diving trips around the world, and it landed her a spot as a contestant on TV's To Tell the Truth.

Jim Crater is a man who recycles fishing line. He's got his household trash down to eight pounds. A year . And despite the fact that for two decades he has run what is surely the region's most quixotic and varied recycling enterprise, here's a little secret about the master recycler: He doesn't think it should be happening. "The lesson isn't to recycle more," he says amid his hivelike realm, a two-acre property strewn with the detritus of a consumptive culture.

   ATLANTIC CITY - Squawking gulls are as ubiquitous on this seashore resort's famous Boardwalk as gamblers and rolling chairs. But the dive-bombing birds have become the target of a city-improvement committee that wants to stop them from stealing food from unsuspecting tourists who stroll or dine along the Boardwalk. By spring, the Atlantic City Special Improvement District plans to install a web of fishing filament 15 feet above the Boardwalk in front of Bally's Park Place & Wild Wild West Casino that is supposed to stop the gulls' stealth maneuvers.

The Delaware River off Chester is UPS brown. On a wooden promenade in Barry Bridge Park, directly beneath the soaring Commodore Barry Bridge, Cashmere Bey casts his fishing line into the murky chop and awaits developments. Catfish offer a good fight, but nothing battles like eels. Eels make Bey, 24, a Temple business student, feel like a Hemingway hero. He bests the wriggling creatures in the fisherman's timeless tug and struggle, then throws them back, as he does all the fish he catches.

Casting for sunfish from a shaded shoreline, canoeing on a spring-fed lake, renting a log cabin on the water - all are less than an hour from home, even if you live in Center City. Throughout the region, lakes built decades ago to supply drinking water and control flooding seeded state and county parks that are now flush with recreation. On a recent sunny morning, Jean Barron was sitting under an umbrella on the sand watching her three great-grandchildren splash in Atsion Lake in Burlington County, one of the few in the area that allow swimming.

Having lived nearly four-score years in the Philadelphia area, and never more than 20 miles from where my family stepped ashore in 1912 from the SS Dominion, I have witnessed many sociological changes on both sides of the Delaware River. Perhaps nowhere are these changes more evident than where I live now, Cooper Plaza Apartments in Pennsauken. It's the same transformation that is happening all over America, a metamorphosis of the nation's ethnic, racial and religious makeup. Not too long before I moved from Voorhees to Pennsauken about 15 years ago, most tenants at Cooper Plaza Apartments were white.

Harvey Peterman of Pottstown drops his fishing line into a hole at Marsh Creek State Park. Peterman may have to drill through the ice again if he wants to go fishing today. The temperature will be 15 to 20 degrees lower, and rain is expected to fall and freeze up later.

William H. Lyman 3d, 50, who never missed a chance to celebrate with fireworks and displays, died Wednesday of a heart attack at his home in Springfield, Delaware County. Mr. Lyman had had heart trouble since 1976. Early in 1977, and again three years ago, he underwent triple-bypass surgery. He had been doing well, said his wife, Linda. As always, Mr. Lyman had gone all out this year for Halloween and made his house the one where trick-or-treaters were very likely to get tricked before and after they collected their treats.

The breeze, cool and soft, tosses the tassels of marsh weeds growing just behind the beach, then slips across the hard sand and over the water where Robert P. Kessel, 72, stands shin-deep in the thump and hiss of advancing and retreating waves, practicing that ancient, solitary act of gambling, surf fishing. The sun rose less than an hour ago. Now, its reflection stretches toward Kessel across the calm sea in a broad, golden path that seems to head for France, and the sun shines through the thin curling waves as they break, translucent green, in front of Kessel or at his knees, sending up into the air dollops of sea water that splatter on the front of his chest-high rubber waders.