CEDAR POINT - If Hemingway's classic "The Old Man and the Sea" were ever recast as the story of a woman, that woman would be Charlotte Fields.

Fields, a salty practitioner of rod and reel, wind and wave, revered the Atlantic's depths.

One day, she and her niece went fishing. When the tide shifted unexpectedly, their motor refused to start.

"Hand me your towel," Fields instructed her niece, Sue Ross. She draped two corners on the bottom of the boat and anchored them with her feet. The top corners she held in her hands.

"She acted like a mast, and we sailed in," Ross said. "She had common sense about the sea."

Charlotte Pittman Fields died a couple of months ago of congestive heart failure. She was 102 and fished off her own boat until her late 80s.

Born in Grifton, Fields was in the first class to graduate from Duke University. When she started school, it was Trinity College. By the time she finished her studies in 1925, it had changed to Duke. She liked to say she had the last Trinity ring and the first Duke diploma.

The war and the sea

She married Alton Fields, a civil engineer, and they traveled to New York and then to Canada in search of work. At the beginning of World War II, as North Carolina's military bases began expanding, his company got a contract at Camp Lejeune. They arrived in 1941 assuming it would be a temporary job, moving into a tiny house Fields' brother built as a shelter for his fishing buddies. A little wooden square of a hut on the inland waterway about a mile from Swansboro, it had no indoor plumbing and no running water.

Fields had taught school before she came to Swansboro, and once she arrived, she substituted now and then.

Soon, though, the sea wooed her away.

Fields' father was a riverboat captain. When she was 5, he became a Methodist minister, a circuit rider for Ocracoke and Portsmouth Islands. He built a sailboat to travel back and forth.

Fields didn't like sailboats, thought they were too rickety, too wobbly, too prone to capsizing, which was a scary thing for someone like Fields who couldn't swim.

That tidbit about Charlotte Fields stopped people in their tracks.

How could someone who essentially lived on the water for more than 90 years not know how to swim?

She never bothered to learn. Instead, she compensated.

She knew the location of every sandbar and learned to row out on the outgoing tide and back on the incoming tide so the motion of the water would nudge her along.

An aunt who fished

As most people do, Fields had a daily routine. Each morning after her husband left for work, she washed the dishes and straightened up the house, then grabbed her tackle box, a bucket, some oars or a motor, and headed out to spend the day at sea.

It was long before the ravages of the sun were widely known, but Fields, a little lady, barely over 5 feet tall, never went out on the water without a wide-brimmed hat and a long-sleeved shirt.

Fields couldn't have children of her own, so she doted on her nieces and nephews instead. Each year, a group of four nephews came to stay for a week or two. Fields didn't have to worry about shenanigans. The rule was that if you misbehaved, you were sent home. And no one wanted to suffer that fate.

Robin Pittman Gordon, Fields' great-niece, spent two weeks with her each summer, fishing, shelling, crabbing. She learned how to tell a male crab from a female and how to grab them without getting pinched, then clean and cook them.

"It was like summer camp to me," Pittman Gordon said.

Because Fields knew where the oysters grew, she always kept a metal pipe with her fishing gear so she could knock them loose from whatever mooring they clung to. Because she knew where the clams hid, she could harvest half a bushel in a day and stick them in the freezer until the cold pried their shells open.

Once, she caught 50 fish, sharing her excitement with a friend who pulled alongside. She encouraged him to cast his line; she was heading home.

The next day, she saw the fisherman and inquired as to his luck the previous day. He hadn't caught a single fish. "You didn't leave any," he said.

Final voyage

She took her last boat trip the year before she died.

It was an autumn day, and Fields stood with her hands gripping the railing, reveling in the wind and the sun and the whoosh of the egrets' wings.

More than a century old by then, she could no longer see, though she could still discern light and shapes. On the boat tour of the waters around Swansboro, she announced to no one in particular that the captain would have to be turning around pretty soon; there was a sandbar ahead.

And there was.

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Charlotte Fields is survived by nieces and nephews.