When it comes to catch-and-re- lease, I’m a humanitarian. I’d sooner kill a man than a trout.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m almost as devoted to peaceful coexistence as I am to matching the hatch. And I love to eat my catch, whether it’s pan-fried over a camp- fire or trout amandine served by candle- light. Each is delicious. But no meal can take the place of a wild trout in a stream. When I first took up fly-fishing — this was back in the 1970s — the creel was going the way of the buggy whip. Fly fishers were discovering they could let the trout go and still get their vibe. “A trout is too valuable to be caught only once,” said Lee Wulff. “Catch and release” was the sport’s mantra. Too bad nobody had thought of that while there were still trout around.
The freestone rivers I fished in New Jersey and in the Poconos and the lime- stone creeks of south-central Pennsylvania were in serious decline due to over- fishing and pollution. What were we to do with the idea that today’s trout stream might become tomorrow’s shopping center? I would drive through endless sub- urban sprawl to reach rivers stocked with hatchery fish, only to leave the stream bitter and angry. From the hammering the trout were taking from both hard- ware salesmen and fly fishers, it seemed clear that “catch and release” was a gesture we would all have to make if we were to continue to enjoy our pastime. Maybe it would turn things around, an idea we clung to like Ishmael to his coffin.
Still, I missed those trout dinners. One of the great attractions of fishing has always been eating your catch. Even Roderick Haig-Brown did it. The late Russell Chatham once estimated that in his heyday, he killed and ate more steel- head than presently live in Washington State. Fortunately, I lived at the Jersey Shore and had access to a vast wilderness — the Atlantic Ocean. All the fish in it were wild, not hatchery born, and most of them were what we now call “sustain- able.” You could kill and eat your catch with a clear conscience. Saltwater fly fishing opened the door to trophy angling and the prospect of a shore dinner.
Anyone who has lived at the shore or vacations there knows how special a shore dinner can be. It is one of the highlights of life by the oceanside. And catching your own fish seems to make this gastronomic treat taste even better. May- be it has something to do with the salty tang in the air. Or just that your catch is likely to be a little fresher than what you brought home from your fishmonger. In any case, your meal was made even more delicious by the fact that you caught it yourself on a fly rod, which takes some doing in the ocean.
As a child growing up within sight of an ocean, it was by no means guaranteed that I would become a sea- food gourmet. I might have become one of those Americans who hate eating fish because they taste “fishy.” I was raised in a Catholic household at a time when meat was still forbidden on Fridays, so naturaly, the fish suppers my mom cooked were dreadful. This is because my mother came from the Irish side of our family, not the Italian side, and the Irish take penance seriously. As for Italians — who have no guilt whatsoever — “fasting” means the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. Maybe this explains why Italians drink for pleasure and the Irish for oblivion.
In any case, my family’s fare was typical of what white-bread Americans were eating in the 1950s. On Friday, it was either tuna casserole or, worse, frozen super- market fillets, and never the bounty of fresh seafood from an ocean that was practically at our doorstep. My mom would defrost the fillets — it was usually haddock — and fry them in a little corn oil, then serve them unadorned, along- side plain boiled potatoes and vegetables that also came in frozen packages. Ugh. New Jersey was, after all, the Gar- den State, and we lived in the southern part, the good part, where truck farms and roadside produce stands abound. But supper at our house on Friday might as well have been the Stations of the Cross.
Otherwise, I had a happy childhood. After all, there was the occasional restaurant meal to be enjoyed, a rare treat for our family of eight. Mom and Dad would take us to someplace fancy like Zaberer’s in Egg Harbor Township or to the Smithville Inn on Route 9 in Absecon to enjoy a fine-dining experience. Invariably, I would order something with a nautical-sounding name like the Captain’s Plate or the First Mate, a mixed platter of fried seafood with lemon wedges and tartar sauce. It was my idea of Heaven.
At sixteen, I got a summer job at Spence’s Seafood Kitchen on the corner of Tenth Street and Asbury Avenue on the resort island of Ocean City. Takeout only, no dining in. Nothing frozen, either — our seafood came fresh from the f leet in Cape May. I washed dishes, prepped food, and sometimes was allowed to work the fryers, despite my in- competence. Customers lined up for our deviled crab, fried and baked flounder, shrimp, oysters, and clams, and our take- away shore dinners were enjoyed by locals and tourists alike. Like many shore businesses, it was open only in the summer- time, and you had only a few months to make your nut before the season ended. And I’d just as soon be fishing. A shore dinner might taste like Heaven, but working in a kitchen was Purgatory. I decided I liked seafood, but didn’t like to work.
So I became a writer, instead. At age twenty-one, I landed a job as a reporter for The Press of Atlantic City, where I got to cover crooked politicians and Mafia rub-outs. It was straight out of The Front Page — a whole lot of fun and excitement, and you got to drink on the job. The rule was to drink scotch, and not vodka. That way, your editor would smell it and know you were drunk and not stupid. On my days off, I went fly fishing to get my dose of the natural world, which existed quite apart from the mean streets and probably saved my life.
Trout fishing was my first love. But the trout streams of the Northeast were letting me down, so when my vacations rolled around, I would fly out to some- place really cool like Jackson Hole or West Yellowstone to get some real action. Back home, I turned to the Atlantic Ocean. Fly fishing in an ocean, I discovered, is way harder than fishing gentle trout streams. You had to cast farther and with more accuracy and you were al- ways fighting the elements. Striped bass and bluefish were the prime targets for Northeastern fly rodders, then as now. Striped bass will take a fly with a tug and a surge. Bluefish hit it like Mike Tyson biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear. When a wolfpack moves in for the kill, a melee ensues. Their teeth are so sharp you have to use a wire shock tippet or lose your fly. I favored bluefish over striped bass be- cause I’m an action junkie. They were my go-to game fish at the Jersey shore. They were also quite good to eat, but you had to know what you were doing.
Bluefish are not popular table fare. Too much “personality” on the plate. Many find the flavor too strong. And that’s certainly the case when the catch is mishandled. But bluefish are delectable when treated right. Once caught, a bluefish has to be bled out immediately. This is done by cutting the vein found between the gills. Once drained, the fish is filleted on the spot and put on ice. Care has to be taken to remove the lateral blood lines that run down the center of the fillets. If left on, they will discolor the flesh and ruin the taste. If you see bluefish fillets in a display case that are splotched with what look like purple wine stains, it’s time to get a new fishmonger. These are only fit to feed to your cat. Bluefish will not wait for you to get home to clean them, and they should be eaten the day they’re caught. They don’t take to freezing or sitting long in the refrigerator. That’s why I always took a filleting knife and an ice chest with me whenever I went out to the beach with the long rod. I turned my bluefish into regal table fare. Particularly tasty were the small “cocktail” blues caught in the back bays.
My best day came on a humid evening in June, with the tide racing around Corsons Inlet at the south end of Ocean City. The light was fading, and a thunderstorm was brewing in the distance. I waded into the chop near the mouth of the inlet, cast, and felt something bump my surface fly. I picked up and cast again to the same spot, and immediately the popping fly disappeared and my rod bent under a living weight. A bluefish jumped twice and then shook itself on the bottom, rubbing the line into the sand.
By now I noticed that the water around me was trembling with a terrific agitation. What looked like a cloud of sand passed under me and then rose to the surface like a scattering of confetti. It was a swarm of baitfish. Gulls dropped from the sky by the tens and twenties. Bluefish crashed the bait ten feet from the beach.
I was wading barefoot, so I backed onto the beach to keep from getting bitten. Abruptly, my fish came off, and I reeled in and hastily tied on another fly. I had forgotten to put on a shock tippet and was too excited to do it now. I made another cast and immediately drew up tight on another bluefish. I got a few minutes of play before it, too, bit off the fly and escaped. For the next twenty minutes, I cast and cast again, tying on new flies with trembling fingers, until the wolfpack passed though the inlet out to sea. I had hooked fifteen bluefish, one on each cast, and had two on the beach. My nine-foot leader had been bitten down to six inches.
I carried the payload back to my car and filleted them on the spot, flinging their skeletons into the dunes. A humid bank of thunderclouds rolled in, and lightning flickered. When I got home, I baked the bluefish Genoa style — with potatoes, parsley, olive oil, and garlic. Outside, the trees looked like dim spiderwebbing. Then the thunder let go with a tremendous crack and the treetops plunged in the wind. Powerful gusts tossed the branches, turning up the pale undersides of leaves. My backyard dimmed one moment, brightened the next, as bolts sizzled over the treetops. Rain hit the roof like a burst of BBs. The meat of the bluefish cooked up white as snow, and I ate it staring out the window.
While bluefish were plentiful in those days, striped bass were not. Finding one in the ocean was like trying to hail a taxicab on a rainy day. The striper fishery was in serious decline, and nobody knew if it would ever come back. Striped bass tended to be nocturnal feeders, and the most productive fishing was usually at night. I caught my first striper along the breakwater at the bay at Longport on Absecon Island. Stripers cruised by the seawall, attracted by streetlamps that threw light onto the midnight water.
I forget what the limit was on striped bass in those days. Probably two a day. And that was probably two too many. We should have been protected those fish from ruthless exploitation and our own foolishness. On the rare occasions I caught one, I killed it on the spot. They were the best-tasting finfish around, and my practice was to catch and release them onto a plate. They seemed to go particularly well with fresh fennel and white wine. You could have served those dinners to Julia Child.
I soon discovered that the “by-catch” of game fishing could also provide a tasty treat. There were many species that I picked up on my fly rod that I had not meant to catch when casting to bluefish and stripers. For example, I never set out deliberately to catch summer flounder, but was pleased when I hooked them. They didn’t put up much of a fight, but they made damn good eating. Whenever I hooked a flatfish, I killed it, if it was legal size. The same with black sea bass, a tasty food fish prized by European chefs. There was a sea bass nursery in the bay at Corsons Inlet where I fished. Come to think of it, I can’t swear that every bass I plucked out of that patch was a legal keeper. But the statute of limitations has run out.
I prepared the black sea bass from a rather fancy Portuguese recipe calling for wine, tomatoes, and a splash of heavy cream that I found in A.J. McClane’s The Encyclopedia of Fish Cookery. McClane was the fishing editor and later executive editor for Field & Stream, but certainly no hick, having traveled to 140 countries to fish. It was also rumored he was a spy for the U.S. State Department, using exotic fishing destinations as a cover, and was regularly debriefed by CIA agents after returning from his trips abroad.
As for the flounder, I would usually dredge the fillets in breadcrumbs and fry them for a classic shore dinner or bake them in the oven with a crab stuffing. The crabs were also a by-catch of my fly-fishing. What we call the “Jersey Shore” is really a series of barrier islands, little more than sand ridges rising above high tide, separated from the true shore of the mainland by blue tidal basins and acres of green marshes. Stripers ran up the tidal creeks to spawn, and resident fish laid over there. I would sometimes go out onto Patcong Creek with a friend who owned a boat and cast my fly at the undercut banks along the marsh’s edges where stripers liked to hold. We’d also sink a few wire traps into the creek to catch some blue crabs to take home to eat. Patcong Creek was renowned for its crabbing. Every June it hosts the biggest crabbing tournament in the nation, called the Attack on Patcong Creek. That was a good day to stay home if you didn’t like to fish in crowds.
I would cook the live crabs in a rolling boil of water, beer, vinegar, and Old Bay seasoning and crack them open with a mallet. Sometimes I would steam them and serve them chilled, with a simple dipping sauce, like the one they make at Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami. Or throw them into a pot of bubbling marinara sauce to serve over spaghetti.
I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later that I would leave New Jersey. After all, trout fishing was my first love, and as far as I was concerned, it was a lost cause back East. For a while I considered moving to Montana, until I remembered there was nothing good to eat there. And I suppose it’s true what they say. Once you’ve lived by an ocean, you’ve got sand in your shoes forever, and you won’t live anywhere else, at least not willingly.
So I moved to another coast. I settled on San Francisco, mainly for the trout and steelhead fishing nearby. Although I sometimes wonder if I really moved there for the Chinese food. It took me a while to adjust my fly fishing to the Pacific Ocean. It was a much bigger body of water than the Atlantic, in both a physical and a psychological sense. So I concentrated mainly on trout and salmon rivers, opening my senses up to the splendid mountains and redwood forests of Northern California.
At first I was afraid to kill a steelhead. I knew they’d make good eating. Very much like salmon. In fact, they were salmon, for purposes of scientific classification. They were also somewhat scarce in California’s rivers. Way down from their historic numbers. Officially a threatened species in many West Coast streams. A precious resource not to be squandered. I thought I was being a good conservationist by not bonking one on the head.
I should have been killing every hatchery fish I hooked. I know now what I didn’t know back then. Hatchery steelhead are a threat to wild steelhead. They lead to fewer, rather than more steelhead. Inbred for generations, hatchery steelhead lack “stream smarts,” but outcompete wild steelhead for food and habitat. I believe they should be eliminated on every river, stream, and tributary creek in the Pacific Northwest where wild steelhead can still reproduce naturally. I realize this is a radical idea and that I am tilting at windmills. But I say it’s time to get rid of our steelhead hatcheries.
Fat chance. The states are deeply invested in them. Commercial, sport, and tribal fishing harvests are managed for maximum “sustainable” yield. And anglers hold to the perfectly reasonable belief that they should be allowed to eat their catch. Still, a guy can dream. Wild steelhead can rebound, if given a chance.
Now I kill a hatchery fish every chance I get, when the law allows it, and would encourage others to do as well. (In California, the legal steelhead limit is two hatchery fish daily, and no wild steelhead.) They may be inferior to wild ones, but they taste just as good. Farm-raised trout that are fed on pellets and available at your supermarket or dumped into a stream are tasteless, but a hatchery steelhead fresh from the ocean, having feasted on the bounty of the sea, is redolent with flavor. So throw one on your barbecue grill with a clean conscience. You are helping the environment.
I have been a fly fisher for a very long time. As Leonard Cohen sang: “I ache in the places where I used to play.” I haven’t been a Catholic since I turned thirteen. If anything, I’m a nature pantheist. (Like Lao Tzu, Spinoza, and Einstein — great minds think alike.) I guess you can say I’m a lapsed Catholic, although it’s more like collapsed. It disheartens me to know that the world’s stocks of billfish and bluefin tuna are a mere tenth of what they were on the day I was born back in the middle of the last century. They say there is no original sin; each is quite banal. Ours is overfishing and letting rivers and oceans die. True, the East Coast striper fishery came back from the dead (right about the time I moved to San Francisco), but things are still chancy. Many saltwater species that were once thought sustainable (if there really is such a thing) are now threatened, although bluefish are still plentiful. I fish for blues and stripers whenever I get back home for a visit. But the West Coast is my home now and has been for some time.
I reckon I release ninety percent of the fish I catch — and let go a hundred percent of the wild trout on inland streams. Whether these fish have been released “unharmed” is another matter. I used to believe fish don’t feel much, that they are little more than their reflexes. That lacking a cerebral cortex, they lack conscious awareness. I don’t believe that now. I believe that like most creatures, they are sentient in some way. Maybe they don’t think, but they react. I worry whether fishing is cruel. It is most certainly violent, like much in nature. I don’t know what to do about any of this. I know I’ll never change. But I guess I’ll always feel guilty. That’s the Irish half of me talking. The Italian half will insist on a good wine with the meal. Everything’s connected, and all life is sacred. I learned that from being outdoors. A dinner taken from the wild is both a feast and a sacrament.