HOME WATERS

I’m at that age when a lot of friends decide to pull up roots and head somewhere else.

People say that New York isn’t the friendliest state to folks who don’t have a steady income, so they head off to Florida, the Carolinas, or similar places, where taxes are lower, their money goes farther, and lifestyles are more in accord with their own. 

At one time, I thought that maybe I’d do about the same thing.

But the closer that possibility came, the less attractive it seemed.  When I stopped to think about it, my home waters—the ocean south of Long Island, Great South Bay, western Long Island Sound—aren’t just print on a map.  They’re the places where I feel most at home, most comfortable, most at peace.  I have little desire to trade them for some soupy Florida bay, where the stench of rot hangs over the water on still, humid nights, or for the Gulf of Mexico off Texas, where the skeletal silhouettes of oil rigs scar the horizon, and you need to run for three hours or more to reach the big-fish grounds.

Many things have changed since I—with some help from my father—cranked in my first fish in the Sound off Greenwich in 1956, and since Mike Mucha and I caught our first yellowfin tuna from a 20-foot Sea Ox back in ’84.  But many things remain the same.

Up in Connecticut, there’s still a pile of boulders at the mouth of the Mianus River that's barely covered at high tide.  It looks much the same as it did in August 1968, when a striped bass hit my trolled sandworms and, instead of taking off for open water, charged up and over the top of the barnacle-covered stones.  I remember my father pulling out an oar and paddling his 15-foot outboard over the rocks in pursuit of the fish, then having to reverse direction as the bass, having reached deep water beyond the rockpile, reversed direction and ran over the boulders.  I recall how relieved I was when I landed that fish, which weighed 18 ½ pounds.  At the time when I caught it, it was the largest striped bass of my life.

Mike Mucha still keeps his boat on the river.  It’s been said that one can’t go home again, but I return to the waters off Greenwich a few times each year, fishing with him, chasing striped bass along with the memories. 

Last May, Brian O’Keefe joined us, and made me realize just how many memories that water holds.  As I tried to explain how to fish it, there was a memory behind every stone. 

“I lost some big striped bass trolling past this rock.  They always bumped the sandworms before they came back and took them, then ran between the two halves of the island and cut me off on the rocks before I could turn them around.”

“Got a 51 here on July 10, 1974.  Wanted a 50 before I turned 20; I made it with 26 days to go.”

“First bass that I ever caught on a plug was inside that stone pier.”

“Hooked a line-class record bluefish right by that boulder; 14-14 on four-pound.”

I fish my old waters, and remember people long gone.  As I drop a bucktail alongside a sod bank, or dance a pencil popper past a submerged stone, I'll irrationally anticipate strikes from striped ghosts that were spawned and passed on four and five decades ago.

For a few quiet hours, the rock-lined coast returns me to s my youth, something that no mangrove-lined creek or subtropical reef could, at their best, ever do.

That youth was spent by the time that I came to Long Island.  By then, I was somewhere between hope and middle age, when the years of possibility were just about gone, and work turned to plodding routine.  Exploring a new bay and the ocean became an outlet for creativity and passion that my job could never inspire.

Thus, I imbued a new place with new memories.

There's a set of deep-water lumps south of Shinnecock, where we’ve caught sharks since 1984.  The very first time that I fished there, my friend Augie Chimbo hooked a big thresher on 30-pound gear that was far too light for the job.  He had the fish on for close to two hours before we ever saw it; the shark, finally tired of circling under the boat, came up in two back-to-back, greyhounding jumps barely sixty feet away, then raced off maybe 300 yards before doing something that I’ve never seen a thresher do since—come straight up out of the water and pinwheel, head curving in one direction, tail in the other, before crashing down on the line and breaking off.

I’ll always recall that one.

The same year, on another set of lumps 20 miles southeast of Fire Island Inlet, I fought a big shark for 5 ½ hours.  My reel’s Teflon drag gave up a couple of hours into the fight, forcing me to jam my hand between the reel’s crossbars and spool, so the fish could tow our small boat around by my fingertips until it tired.  Five hours and 35 minutes into the fight, the shark was finally exhaused and coming in when a bluefish slashed at a piece of chum that got stuck on the line, cutting the fish free and leaving me free as well, to go home, bandage my raw, oozing hands, and think about what could have been.

I’ll always recall that one, too, just as I’ll recall our first tournament win, when Mike Mucha peeled a 166-pound bigeye tuna off Hudson Canyon's West Elbow, and the time when his brother Gerry took a first-place white marlin from an ocean so ugly that we put the fish in the boat around noon, but were barely able to make it home in time for the 7:00 p.m. weigh-in.

And it’s not all about the big fish.

There’s a deep lump off Fire Island that reliably provides fluke when the squid are around.  My wife and I were out there catching fish one 4^th of July when I looked up to see maybe 100 square yards of ocean filled with good-sized fish of some kind.  I tried to cast to them, but as soon as I reached for a rod they all spooked, revealing themselves as black drum, the first ones I ever encountered in local waters.  Another day, I fished the same spot with Bill McGinley, and had a squid-hungry striped bass follow my bait all the way from the bottom, grab it just as I lifted it out of the water, and take off on a hard run.  The fish was eventually released at boatside, and must weigh close to 50 if it’s alive today.

I’ve found a lot of places like that.  A slope leading down to a channel, where flounder used to bunch up on the outgoing tide.  Channel edges where weakfish feed in the first thin light before dawn.   A sheltered cove that can produce enough good-sized blowfish for a coule of meals.

Knowing those places makes me unwilling to trade Long Island's waters for an new and unfamiliar sea.  It's nice to be able to close your eyes, and picture all of the holes and lumps that stretch from the beach to the canyons.

The truth is, if you fish your home waters for enough years, and they begin to own you. 

Fish them for enough years, and you begin to feel like you own them, too.

And when you own something, you want to protect it.  I’ve spent a lot of years trying to convince state and federal regulators to properly conserve and manage marine fish stocks.  I’m not going to pretend that it was all altruistic; as I’ve said many times, beginning after the striped bass stock collapsed, I got involved with fisheries management out of a sense of self-defense.  Fishing is a lot more enjoyable when there are fish around, and so as long as I’m a fisherman—and I’ve lived too long to start becoming something else now—I might as well do my best to protect my interests.

But as much as I might try to fight it, altruism starts sneaking in.

All of us, who have taken our joy from the water, have a solemn obligation to pay it forward, so that the good times don’t end with us.  We pay by respecting the resource, advocating for its health, and serving as mentors to others.  I’ve paid that debt as well as I can, yet it will never be fully discharged.

The funny thing about that is that the more work I do on behalf of healthy fish stocks, the closer that I’m drawn to them.  I feel as if I’ve made an investment in their future, ad investment that I would be very reluctant to abandon now. 

I hope that others feel much the same.