SPORT FISHING: THE MORE THINGS CHANGE...

 

I recently saw an article in the New York Post (hardly a stellar reference, but it came up in a Google alert) which was headlined “Wall Street finance bros have found their newest flex—but it’s dividing one of the Hampton’s oldest communities.”  As I read it, I was forced to think back on the history and trajectory of offshore sport fishing, and on how much things change, while remaining, in some ways, the same.

The article opened with the words,

“A 300-pound tuna fish doesn’t care how much your house costs.  And on the ocean, there are no VIP tables or name-dropping.

“As the offshore tuna season reaches its peak at Montauk, Long Island, a wave of Wall Street thrill-seekers, million-dollar sportfishing boats and first-time charter anglers are pouring into one of the East Coast’s oldest fishing communities.

“For generations, the only people who fished tuna were the ones whose lives revolved around the water.

“Now these veteran anglers are begrudgingly sharing the beloved recreational sport of deep-water fishing for hard-fighting, giant and prized tuna fish with city slickers who only recently learned about the big game pursuit thanks to social media and TV.”

There are a lot of things wrong with that paragraph, beginning with the notion that Montauk is “one of the East Coast’s oldest fishing communities.”  While some fishing always took place there, the Montauk/Easthampton area was dominated by agriculture, particularly cattle ranches, through much of its early history.  It’s remote location made it difficult to transport fish to market until 1895, when a new branch of the Long Island Rail Road connected the village to New York City, and its coastline provided dubious shelter for vessels until 1926, when real estate developer Carl G. Fisher, who had purchased 10,000 acres of Montauk land, blasted through the thin strip of coastline that separated what was then freshwater Lake Montauk from Block Island Sound, and created the harbor that now shelters Montauk’s fishing fleet.

Compared to ports in New England—the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, was exporting fish to Europe and the West Indies well before the Revolutionary War—that makes Montauk a relative newcomer as far as fishing communities go.

But where the New York Post piece really goes off the rails is when it says that “for generations, the only people who fished tuna were those whose lives revolved around the water,” and its suggestion that “the beloved recreational sport of deep-water fishing for hard-fighting, giant and prized tuna fish” being enjoyed by “city slickers” is something new.

In fact, offshore sport fishing has always been the pursuit of well-heeled individuals who could afford the price of ocean-capable boats, hired captains and crews, and the travel needed to get where the fish are.  It has only been in relatively recent times—say, the last 50 years or so—that offshore fishing became readily accessible to people of more modest means, as advances in boat and engine technology allowed manufacturers to build less expensive, outboard-powered boats that were nonetheless capable of carrying fishermen to productive deep waters.

A recent article in Marlin magazine, which described the role United States anglers played in developing the sport of big-game fishing, observed that

“The roots of modern big-game fishing run straight back to Catalina Island [California] in the early 1900s…

“Rod and reel designs improved rapidly.  Captains learned how to handle their boats around a hooked fish.  Anglers figured out through hard experience what worked and what didn’t—and crucially, they wrote it down.  Catches were weighed, measured, photographed, and documented.  What could have been forgotten became the foundation for something lasting.  Catalina Island is home to the Avalon Tuna Club, one of the oldest and most influential institutions in the sport.

“Zane Gray [a California dentist who made his fortune writing pulp novels about the American West], an active member of the Avalon Tuna Club and once served as vice president, was the person who related that foundation to a wider audience.  His vivid account of bluefin battles reached readers throughout the country who had never been near salt water, and they made the sport feel worth aspiring to.  Grey didn’t just write about catching fish; he captured the physicality of it, the hourslong battles against powerful animals, the exhaustion, the exhilaration.  He made anglers look like athletes, which, honestly, they were.”

 At the birth of the offshore sport, wealthy anglers, inspired by writing in the print media of the day, became interested in fishing for tuna and other offshore species.  No, they weren’t necessarily “finance bros,” although some probably did have Wall Street connections, and they learned about fishing for bluefin by reading about it, rather than by viewing “social media and TV”.  But, more than a century ago, there were already “city slickers” entering the fishery; the new anglers described in the Post article were merely new pilgrims following a trail first laid down many decades ago.

Offshore fishing came to Montauk soon after Montauk Lake was opened up to the sea, with the Montauk Yacht Club being built soon after.  Even before the Second World War, wealthy angler-authors such as S. Kip Farrington, who entered his family’s stock brokerage firm at the age of 16, and Van Campen Heilner, born into a family made wealthy by coal mines, fished Montauk waters.

The “finance bros” have been catching tuna at Montauk for a very long time.

But what they did with those tuna—and the other fish that they caught—wasn’t completely clear.

Some of them might have ended up in the Yacht Club’s kitchen, although giant bluefin weren’t considered good eating back then, and might just as well have ended up in a landfill or dumped out at sea after being weighed and taken down from the scales.  It’s also quite likely that a lot of fish ended up with the boats’ crews, who could have kept them for personal consumption, or sold them for whatever the market might pay.  The historical record isn’t too clear about that.

But one thing that was pretty clear was that the anglers didn’t feel the need to sell fish for their own account; they were already quite wealthy, and certainly didn’t have to sell fish for whatever pennies they might bring.

That has changed since the old days, for today, even the folks in the “million-dollar sportfishing boats” mentioned by the Post will take fish to market, for whatever value they might bring.  That was mentioned in the Post article, when it noted that

“’A lot of these guys are millionaires, and they come out and catch fish,” Montauk-based commercial fish dealer Bryan Gosman, 53, told The Post.

“Among longtime commercial fishermen, Gosman said there’s an unspoken understanding: the new sportfishing boom has changed the culture.

“’Commercial guys get irritated because it does affect the market of fish.  They think sportfishing guys don’t take good care of the fish; it becomes performative,’ he added.  ‘The picture is more important.’

“’They’re multi-millionaires.  The $4,000 check they get for a fish doesn’t even matter.’

“The New York fishing market as a whole is valued at around $42 million, and a single top-quality 1,000 pound tuna can fetch fishermen up to $10,000.  An influx of new era banker fishermen who aren’t interested in quality or profit could significant [sic] dent longtime family businesses, for whom this is their only income stream.”

Such blurring of the lines between commercial and recreational fishermen just wasn’t something that happened in the early days of offshore sport fishing.

Another big difference is that, as offshore game fishing became more popular, the pioneers tried to make it into a legitimate sport, in which anglers competed on a more-or-less even basis.  As the Marlin article noted,

“As the sport grew, so did the ambition—and the chaos.  Without standardized rules, the concept of a fishing record became increasingly meaningless.  Anglers were using heavier lines and bigger reels, and making claims that couldn’t be verified or fairly compared.  The achievements were real, but the framework to verify them didn’t exist yet.

“That changed in 1939 when Michael Lerner founded the International Game Fish Association (IGFA).  His goal wasn’t to control the sport; it was to protect what achievement in the sport actually meant…If the rules were the same everywhere, then the only variable that mattered was the skill of the angler.

“What the IGFA gave fishermen was something more valuable than a record book.  When you held an IGFA record, you knew exactly what it took to earn it, and so did everyone else.  Over time, the IGFA evolved far beyond a regulatory body.  It became the global conscience of sport fishing, a persistent reminder that how you catch a fish is just as important as having caught it at all.  [emphasis added]”

Under IGFA rules, an angler must fight the fish from the hookup until it is leadered alongside the boat; a catch isn’t deemed legitimate if someone hooks the fish and then hands off the rod, and no one may touch the rod, reel, or line at any time during the fight.  If the rod is resting in a rod holder when a fish hits, it must be immediately removed; fighting a fish with the rod still in the holder is considered taboo.  Fish may not be harpooned, or shot, or mutilated by sharks or the boat’s propellers and still be deemed a legitimate catch.  And electric reels may not be employed.

There are other rules, too, all designed to make the battle between man and fish something approaching a fair fight, and making it easier to gauge anglers’ achievements.

That, too, is something that makes this modern era different from what went before.  While the IGFA’s rules still govern world records, and are used as the standard of conduct in many, probably most, major fishing tournaments, they are more and more ignored by the new generation of offshore anglers.

In the bluefin tuna fishery, fighting a big fish from a rod still stuck in a holder—effectively making the fish fight the boat, not the angler, which was something formerly done only by commercial fishermen—has become standard operating procedure for many anglers.  One charter boat captain even has a video describing the process.

“…I constantly wanna [sic] be pulling that fish towards the boat because we don’t take the rod out of the rod holder so that’s why I’m gonna keep the [boat in] gear and you guys shouldn’t either because you’re gonna be using at least 130 130 [sic] pounds Spectra or braided line if you will.  You guys are gonna be using at least that much because there’s no reason to fish ‘em any less.  Then, if you decide that you need to hold the pole cuz [sic] it’s gonna make you a better person, good luck with that.  I hope that everything works out fine because you’re gonna be using thirty to forty pounds of drag and you’re gonna be holding the pole.  Use your boat it’s way easier.  It’s all about holding the fish up by the tail.  It’s not about the battle.  Nobody cares that it took you 3 hours and but if you’re a he man and you need to get in there and battle with the fish so you’re sore for the rest of the week.  Go right ahead and put a harness on and fight that sucker.  The way we do it, we keep the rod in the gunnel…  [emphasis added]”

Basically, that captain is doing is doing his best to take the “sport” out of sportfishing, taking a sport that, at it’s core, is all “about the battle” and turning it into an exercise in which the only thing that matters is having a dead fish in the cockpit and holding up the tail for what will presumably be photos to be shared across social media platforms.  It’s kind of equivalent to starting a marathon, then after joggoing for 50 yards or a little more, taking a cab to the finish line before declaring that you “ran” the race.

Such thinking makes a mockery out of Ernest Hemingway’s famous words, describing a fight with a bluefin tuna:

“It is a back-sickening, sinew-straining, man-sized job even with a rod that looks like a hoe handle.  But if you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight, fight him man against fish until your muscles are nauseated with the unending strain, and finally bring him up alongside the boat, green-blue and silver in the lazy ocean, you will be purified and able to enter unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods, and they will make you welcome.”

It’s hard to see how letting the boat fight the fish and just holding it up by the tail for photos might seem rewarding.

And, by the way, using “thirty to forty pounds of drag” while fighting a fish is not a big deal, despite that captain’s comments.  I turn 72 in a couple of weeks, and I still use 27 pounds of drag on my 80-pound standups, and sincerely hope that when I head out tomorrow morning, I’ll find a big thresher shark—maybe something in the 300-400 pound range—that will drag me around the cockpit for a couple of hours while I’m harnessed to the rod getting some of my favorite kind of exercise.  (It’s not impossible that I might even find a nice bluefin, though that’s a lot less likely.)

But forty pounds of drag, for an angler fighting a bluefin from a chair, with a good footrest and a bucket harness, is just no big deal.

Yet recent years have seen many anglers enter a degraded “sport” where rods never leave their holders, fish are harpooned, and anglers think nothing of handing off the rod when they get a little tired, well before their back has been sickened, their sinews strained, or their muscles nauseated by what should be the sheer joy of the fight.

When the only point of the exercise is putting a dead fish in the boat, and putting photos up on the Internet, the essence of sport fishing is lost, as the fish becomes not a respected, if unwilling, opponent, but merely an object in a self-promotion campaign.

Yet some people still feel the sport’s original attraction.  As the Post reported,

“’Tuna fishing is oddly addicting,’ one Hampton Bays-based fisherman told The Post.  That’s why some of those Wall Street guys get a taste for it, and they’re like, ‘This is so awesome.’’

“’You get out there for like a banker guy who works in New York City, and you get offshore, and you see 40 whales feeding with their mouths open, it’s like National Geographic.’”

“’I’ve seen guys get hooked on this sport in one trip,  They caught their first 150 pound tuna, and they were all in, even so far as going to buy a boat,’ veteran offshore angler Nick Carro told The Post.”

Some things do remain the same.

Bluefin tuna still swim off Montauk’s shores, and the possibility of fishing for, and perhaps even catching, one of those great fish is still being communicated to the public, even if electronic media has largely replaced the traditional paper and ink.  Although the fish are now more accessible to the public than they were when Montauk Inlet was new, and the fishery is no longer the exclusive province of millionaires, offshore fishing is still the kind of expensive pastime that has always attracted a disproportionate number of wealthy adherents; “finance bros” have been in the fishery since its very first days.

And when an angler hooks up, whether that angler is a carpenter, a lawyer, or a hedge fund manager, those bluefin will still pull hard, and provide the same mental and physical challenges that they did a century ago.

Assuming, of course, that the angler is willing to accept the challenge of fighting a big fish one-on-one, with the rod out of the holder and no harpoon on board.

The fact that many of today’s anglers are not is, perhaps, the biggest difference between then and now.

And the most unfortunate.

Because if an angler seeks sport, how you catch a fish is just as important as having caught it at all.