MISQUAH — With the opener at hand, Eunice Dahlquist used her Klatch column this week to issue what she called “the only opener advice that has ever mattered,” which concerns sandwiches, and which begins and very nearly ends with the instruction: ham, mustard, and no lettuce, unless you are looking for trouble out there.

The emergency opener sandwich, in Eunice’s long-settled doctrine, is not a meal but an insurance policy — made the night before, wrapped in waxed paper, and stowed in the boat against the near-certainty that the fish will not cooperate and the morning will run long. “Lettuce is a fair-weather food,” she wrote. “It wilts, it slides, it betrays you at the worst moment, which on the opener is every moment. Mustard holds. Ham holds. A good sandwich should be able to survive a tackle box, and lettuce cannot survive a stern look.”

She allows, grudgingly, for variation — a slice of cheese “if you must,” summer sausage “for the traditionalists” — but draws a firm and personal line at anything she classifies as “ambitious,” a category that includes sprouts, aioli, and “anything you’d have to explain to your grandfather.” The sandwich, she maintains, is meant to be eaten cold, with one hand, while the other hand does something useful, or at least hopeful, with a rod.

Her column closed with the reminder she closes most columns with this time of year: pack more than you think you need, because someone in the boat will have forgotten, and that someone is the reason the emergency sandwich is called what it is. “You are not packing for yourself,” she wrote. “You are packing for the man who said he wasn’t hungry at four-thirty in the morning and discovers at nine that he was wrong.”