Whoever it was who said that fishing is a disease and fly fishing its terminal phase must have been thinking about doing it in the ocean.
On this day, the surf at Rockaway Beach on the coast of Northern California is big, but not too overwhelming. Yesterday, the water was cloudy and full of seaweed, the sand littered with beach wrack torn loose from kelp beds. Today, the ocean is blue offshore, greenly translucent closer in. The waves are rising in swells and crashing into a white turbulence that foams up the sand.
I can see by the movement of a great flock of pelicans and gulls that the striped bass are more than a hundred and fifty yards out from the beach. In saltwater fly fishing, it is not only pleasurable to watch bird life, but essential, if you want to track the movements of fish. These shorebirds are drawn to a dark cloud moving under the green water. A hundred strong and still gathering, they are dropping by the tens and twenties into the green and whitely marbled ocean. Bait scatters on the surface like a rain squall.
Now the birds are moving toward shore, toward me. I can see the black-and-white backs of bass moving under the green water. These bass are ripping into a mass of fleeing baitfish skipping frantically through the surf and heading for the beach. I send a cast sailing out the guides of my rod and land my streamer fly in the first trough that has formed between the waves and the beach. The riptide pulls like a river current, sending my fly into the whitewater wash around a pair of boulders. I strip in line, feel a fierce yank, and am tight to a striped bass that thrashes around the rocks before attempting a run for open water. With much give and take, I am able to force the fish to come my way. Finally subdued, the striper hangs in a trough close to the beach until a wave lifts it up, helping me to glide it onto the sand.
My bass shows seven black stripes running all the way from behind its gill plates to the base of its tail. These stand out against a grayish-green back, bright silver sides, and a pearly white underside. Perhaps best of all are its beautiful golden eyes with their dark black pupils. As I let the striped bass go, I can’t help but think that in a world where things don’t always go the way we would like, fly fishing is a way of making things happen the way we want them to happen.
When I first took up fly fishing more than twenty years ago, one of the things I wanted to make happen was to catch a striped bass on a fly rod. For a time, I lived on a barrier island at the New Jersey shore during an era when striped bass were very hard to come by. I find it endlessly ironic that I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when its fabled striper fishery was going into a decline, only to learn that back home, East Coast stripers were beginning to make a miraculous comeback.
The resurgence of the Eastern striped bass fishery has been credited with the rise in the popularity of saltwater fly fishing, especially in the New England and Mid-Atlantic states. The striped bass, it has been said, are the reason one sees so many East Coast anglers walking around on the beaches these days with slender graphite lances and fly reels machined from bar-stock aluminum.
That was not the case when I began my saltwater fly fishing more than twenty years ago. For a decade, I fished on the barrier island beaches of southern New Jersey, and not once did I ever see another angler with a fly rod. I had no one to teach me how to do it well, no one to turn to for instruction. Only much later did I learn that one of the nation’s earliest saltwater fly-fishing clubs, the Saltwater Fly Rodders of America, had established itself at Seaside Park in New Jersey, an hour’s drive from my home at the shore. There was no excuse for my not knowing this, because I was employed at the time as a newspaper reporter, and it was my job to find out little-known things. I would read religiously Nelson Bryant’s outdoors columns in the New York Times, especially those columns where he would describe fly fishing for stripers off the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard, and I would wonder why I never saw anyone doing similar things on my beaches.
The great casting instructor Lefty Kreh once credited his own ability to cast as well as he did with the fact that no one ever taught him how to do it. He said he was much better off learning on his own. I guess this only goes to dramatize the difference between guys who have natural athletic ability and guys like me who have none whatsoever. Every casting error I am still prone to make after all these years, I am ashamed to say, I learned myself. My first saltwater fly rod was a fiberglass pole that flexed deeply down into the soft rod. I had to struggle mightily for distance on the beach, and I tended to cast loops wide enough to fly a small airplane through. Later, I switched to a more expensive fly rod manufactured from a relatively new material called graphite.
I lived in a beach town called Ventnor on a barrier island in a community known as the Downbeach. My apartment was a block and a half away from the beach and a short distance from a bay that separated our island from the mainland. What is called the Jersey Shore is really a string of barrier islands, sand ridges rising slightly above high tide, separated from the true shore of the mainland by blue tidal basins full of green and golden marshes.
It was a special place, the Jersey Shore. In the spring, you could walk out on the undeveloped sections of the barrier islands and spot the flipper tracks of sea turtles that had dragged themselves onto the sand at night. Turtles were often spotted crossing the roads along the marshes in springtime, traveling to lay their eggs in the sand. “Turtle Crossing” signs were posted on the marsh causeways to warn motorists not to run them over.
In the spring, shad were being caught, and striped bass were ascending the tidal creeks. The spartina grass grew greener, and everywhere there was a fresh green light on the marsh. In the spring, the marshes were invaded by red-winged blackbirds that sang territorial songs in the cattails and reeds.
Summer, real summer, meant schools of bluefish and sharks farther offshore and swordfish and marlin out in the blue-water canyons. Gunk holes in the bays would fill up with flounder, and there was good crabbing up in the tidal creeks. The kiss of sun, the fresh breeze on your face, the taste of salt on your cracked lips, made you glad to be a shore person.
In our Atlantic waters, the saltwater fish most prized by anglers was the striped bass. It was the handsomest and best-tasting of the fin fish. Striped bass have enjoyed a major resurgence along the Atlantic coast in recent years due to conservation measures and size limits adopted by the New England and Middle Atlantic states. Peter Kaminsky had recently written a book about fly fishing for stripers off Montauk Point, and he had titled it The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass. He wasn’t exaggerating about the abundance. But in those days when I was fly fishing the Jersey Shore, you were lucky if the moon pulled up two or three stripers. At that time, the East Coast striper seemed to be on the brink of extinction. In the Downbeach town known as Longport, at the southern tip of the barrier island I lived on, it was not the moon, but the glow of street lamps above a rocky breakwater that pulled up striped bass from the bay. Baitfish drew to harbor lights and stripers to baitfish. I caught my first striped bass on a fly rod from this breakwater one midnight, timing my back casts so as to avoid cars that were passing in the street behind me. I began exploring the back bays that divided the barrier islands from the mainland, walking the sod banks of marshes that were flooded by high tides twice a day. Blue basins and a network of tidal channels divided these islands of salt hay and cord grass, marshland more yielding in nutrients than the greenest cornfields. Farther inland were the flowering spike grasses of higher marshlands, where cattails and high reeds dominated a landscape of freshwater tidal rivers, where the brackish waters mixed with saltier floods. These were good places to catch stripers in the springtime.
Sometimes I would fish the golden green marshes that lay behind the casino high-rises of Atlantic City, a landscape that seemed more suitable for dumping a body after a mob hit than for fly fishing. Because I was a newspaper reporter, I actually knew some of the people who were rumored to have put those bodies in those marshes.
I had a friend named Albert Black, a private detective widely known for holding the world’s record for unreliable news tips. Albert owned a boat, but he rarely bothered to take it out on the water. That might have had something to do with his being overweight and not physically active. Like the fictional detective Nero Wolf, Albert weighed one-seventh of a ton. I couldn’t understand how someone rich enough to own a boat (Albert ran one of the biggest private security agencies in southern New Jersey) wouldn’t use it, and I had to plead and cajole to get Albert to take me fishing.
One day, Albert decided to take the boat out of dry dock in Tuckerton and run it out to Mystic Island. We anchored over a gunk hole, and Albert sat in the stern to bait his hooks with cut squid. “Why is it,” Albert said, “that squid tastes better in a restaurant when it’s called calamari?” Albert’s boat had a high center console and was not well suited for fly casting, but I stood up on the deck and began assembling my fly rod anyway.
“You’re going to fish with that?” Albert couldn’t believe his eyes. I stood on the rocking deck, working out my line as Albert began catching flounder on the bottom. Fishermen on nearby boats looked at me as if I had been put there to provide them with comic relief. In those days, gear anglers regarded saltwater fly fishers as cranks. The method was seen as wholly impractical for catching fish in the ocean.
“So what have you heard?” I asked Albert. He was my source for a lot of underworld news.
“I heard that Little Nicky eats his Sunday dinner backwards.” Little Nicky was Atlantic City’s mob boss. “He eats the bracciola and meatballs first, and then he eats the pasta.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” “Most Italians start with pasta, then serve the meat, and finish with a salad. But Little Nicky eats the meat first and then the pasta afterward. It’s the way his people, who are Calabrians, do it.”
“I can’t put that in the newspaper…. Hey! I’ve got something.” I pulled up on the rod. We’d see who’d have the last laugh now. But it was only a clam that had closed its lid on my saltwater fly and wouldn’t let go.
“Hey, I’ll bet that’s some kind of record,” said Albert. “A clam on a fly rod — maybe you’ll be written up in your own newspaper.”
Unlike in the Florida Keys, where the saltwater fly-fishing scene on the flats had been fully scoped out years before, fly fishing in the colder waters of New England and the Middle Atlantic Seaboard was regarded as somewhat idiosyncratic. Today, catching bonito and false albacore with a fly rod has become all the rage. Guide services have sprung up to cater to the needs of these new fly fishers. On the beaches of Martha’s Vineyard, one is more likely to encounter fly fishers than spin fishers and surfcasters. But back when I started out, fishing with Albert Black in a boat wholly unsuited for fly casting, I could not have foreseen the coming trend.
And so I fished mostly by myself on sandy beaches and inlets, casting for striped bass and bluefish as the surf flung its spray into the wind and journeying birds crossed the sky. Beneath the waves, I could sense great schools of fish swimming out of reach of my casts.
One of the more convenient places I found to fish was a naked spit of land at the southern end of the island of Ocean City known as Corsons Inlet. If you are inclined toward literature, as I am, you might be familiar with a poem written by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet A. R. Ammons describing the reeds, bayberries, and primroses found in the thicket of dunes there. I would park my car in a dirt lot behind those dunes, assemble my fly rod, and strike out on a well-worn path through back dunes bursting with goldenrod and searocket. I’d swat at biting greenheads until coming out at last over a ridge of primary dunes, where I would see the Atlantic combers rolling in and the far, bright rim of the ocean horizon. I would walk down the beach toward a low spit of sand at the very end of the island where the tides swept back and forth across the narrow opening of Corsons Inlet.
One June evening, I experienced a tremendous bluefish blitz at Corsons. It was some of the most exciting fishing of my life. There was a low bank of thunderclouds forming in the west. The surfcasters had given up, giving me the run of the beach. I waded into the surf near the choppy mouth of the inlet and cast into the breaking waves. I was casting a popper on the surface, felt a bump, and in the fading light I saw a motion in the water near my fly. I cast again to the same spot, and this time the popper disappeared beneath the surface and my rod bent under the heavy tug of what turned out to be a bluefish. The bluefish nearly yanked the rod out of my hand. It jumped twice and shook itself on the bottom, rubbing the line in the sand. All around me, the water began trembling with a general agitation. A cloud of sand seemed to pass under the water and then rose to the surface like silver coins. I was looking into a swarm of fleeing baitfish. Gulls dropped into the water all around me. I hadn’t seen any birds previously; I had no idea where they came from. This was incredible — a school of bluefish was balling bait not ten feet from the beach.
Abruptly, my bluefish came off the line. I had been fishing without a wire shock tippet, hoping for striped bass. The toothy bluefish had sheared the monofilament clean. I tied on another fly, cast again into the boiling water, and immediately struck another bluefish. I battled that fish for five minutes until it, too, came off. In the next twenty minutes, I hooked fifteen bluefish as the wolfpack passed through the inlet out to sea, the gulls following in a screaming, wheeling mass. I managed to beach two fish. The others had bitten through the nine-foot leader, which was now down to six inches.
A beach at night feels different than it does by day. For one thing, the surf sounds louder. So does the clanging buoy bell out in the channel. And nighttime is the best time to fish for stripers. It is said that stripers’ eyes don’t adjust well to bright sunlight and that they are less wary and more aggressive at night. Of late, stripers have been feeding much more actively by day than they did in the past. This is probably because as their numbers increase along the Eastern Seaboard, the numbers of available baitfish go down, and so the bass need to feed more often. But back in the days when striped bass were scarce, the best time to fish for them was in the wee hours past midnight.
Although I couldn’t see well in the dark, I could hear it when stripers chased bait within fly-casting range. To this starving man, it sounded like a porterhouse steak cooking on a grill. One moonless night on a spring tide at Corsons, I waded into this feeding sound and began casting. I felt a grab and came up tight on the rod. The fish on the end of my line shook its head and made a run for freedom. The handle of my reel turned, but I checked its flight. For ten minutes my fly rod dipped and recovered as I struggled to control the fish. Finally I was able to bring it up on the beach. I got out my flashlight for a good look. It was a bass marked by black horizontal stripes on a body as cold and gleaming as the stars above the Atlantic. I laid my fish in the sand and returned to the water. I could hear baitfish like rain on the surface and bass slashing at them. In the next half hour, I caught and released three more striped bass.
They were a hard-won catch. When the action stopped, I built a small fire on the beach for company. The driftwood was full of salt and sea chemicals and burned with a low, yellow flame. I spent the remainder of the night on the beach at Corsons, not leaving until the nacreous dawn light brightened the water. I thought that morning of how the ocean appears exactly as it must have to the first humans. Just about everything on land has changed appearance, but the outward appearance of the ocean stays the same.
Someone once observed that the Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic the ocean of the present, and the Pacific the ocean of the future. I decided that my future was on the West Coast. I left New Jersey just in time to miss the renaissance of striper fishing on the Eastern Seaboard.
Today, I look out at the crashing Pacific breakers on the California coast and feel that this is where Manifest Destiny must have ended. Civilization began on the far side of this ocean, gradually moving westward over the centuries, until arriving finally in California, where, as the joke would have it, it came to an abrupt end. I am now a West Coast person, with all the baggage that carries.
But they say that a person from the Jersey Shore always has sand in his shoes. I think of what it was like living on that barrier island in those days. Every year on the day after the big Labor Day holiday, I would step out on the empty beach and feel something different in the air. You couldn’t define the feeling precisely, but it was there. For one thing, I would feel that I should be getting ready to go back to college, even though I had graduated many years before. What I felt in the air was the end of summer.
The crowds were gone, the beach deserted, the sky and ocean a universal blue harmony. There was a new sound on the beach, a greater sound: the surf growing heavier up and down the long miles of sand. The sound it made in its endless incomings and gatherings spoke both to finality and continuity. The Atlantic seemed somehow bluer, the surf pounding with the echo of everything that had been spoken during the summer. They say you can leave the shore, but it never leaves you. I live on another coast now.
This story originally appeared in FlyFishing & Tying Journal, Summer 2003. It has been revised in minor ways.
