I was struck with a sense of purpose, an instinctual call to action—a rite of passage awaited. I sat patiently in the church pew, half-watching the wedding officiant deliver the final covenant, half-dreaming of striped bass in raging surf. For I knew not of a more divine marriage than the approaching stormfront and a breaking Harvest Moon tide, set to meet the following dawn. Twelve hours later, the social melee of cocktail hour and reception survived without a dip into social quicksand, and the 4 a.m. alarm had me giddy on arrival. In the untarnished adolescence of my surf-fishing journey, I had not yet faced a full-blown nor’easter. I was a 30-year-old surf virgin.
Having had the opportunity to ply inshore and offshore haunts by boat most of my life, stripping the pursuit down to its studs was not a logical choice. Yet, the added degree of difficulty and rugged individualism that pervades the sport’s over-caffeinated and sleep-starved artists was undeniably appealing. In my rare encounters with reclusive rock hounds, usually in the 4:57 a.m. Dunkin line, I noticed their elemental enthusiasm. I could only assume it was the result of a successful nocturnal mission, even though they would never confirm it. There was mystery, there was intrigue, there was an unmistakable stench of slimy self-actualization.
Few angling exploits require as much suspension of traditional sense and indication as does surfcasting past the eventides. The clues to lure selection might be just beyond your waders, yet you might not see them until the moon arrives. The circling of gulls or terns, showing you where to direct your casts in daytime, play little part in this theater. There’s no fleet, no lineup, no bent-rod pattern to save you from a skunk. You’re alone with your thoughts. It takes a steadfast belief system, a patchwork quilt of memory, rumor, and junk science, to contend with the vast expanse of a boulder field or sand labyrinth in utter darkness. It also takes a certain mentality to shun technology and choose the path of resistance, for no other reason than the fire it lights within.
When shells finally crunched beneath my boots, a lightning bolt framing the horizon of storm swell on a bayside beach, I was glad my baptism would be of the Old Testament variety. Thankfully, a good shepherd named Fee was already triangulating a high spot on a submerged bar as I found my bearings. Jimmy, through his own writing and less than subtle in-person suggestion, had shrewdly stoked my curiosity in the arcane methods of Frank Daignault and Steve Shiraka. Bit by bit, I was fed snippets of surf lore, names of forgotten blitzes, and intel that drew a connection to the culture of the old Cape. At last I relented, amid a slump in my light-tackle tuna pursuits, and grabbed a set of worn waders off basement hook, the seams as structurally sound as my confidence in a yard sale metal-lip.
My first passes at putting together a plug bag were generally ludicrous, a crude over-assembly of misfit toys of multi-species horror. At last, I embraced the cutthroat mentality of a strict forage-based selection. Gone were the giant glidebaits for chance slack-tide encounters. Gone were the impossible-to-cast finesse offerings. Dozens of soft-plastic hues were shelved, too, in favor of simple yellows, olives, and blacks. One multi-tool, one leader case and sleeve for SPRO Power swivels and TA clips, and one roll of tape that could be a bandage, back-up measuring device, and wader patch. The simplicity was freeing. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Most of my bag now consisted of plugs or jigs I had some shred of confidence in, save the gifted needlefish that Jimmy assured me was the Yamamoto Senko of the surf. “It doesn’t really do anything, but it has big-fish pedigree,” he noted as my eyes began to roll, before adding “I’ve caught two 50s on them.” That got my attention.
Back on the beach, now leaning slightly forward to counterbalance wind and crashing waves, I peered out toward the wash, squinting to ID some defining feature. In my multi-species pursuits, there’s rarely been an element of randomness when it comes to finding the ‘spot within the spot’, and that rule holds true even on an expansive beachhead. For smallmouth bass, it can be a rock pile on a deep tapering point; for bluefin, it may be a 2-degree temp break on the 20-fathom line with ample bait. For striped bass, a cut in the outer bar is an ideal staging area, especially during a full moon and falling tide. Such cuts can become highway rest stops for schools of migratory bass and, more importantly, a funnel for baitfish. Formed by the pressure of sweeping tidal current, the outgoing draws from an inner trough or inlet meeting heavy swell and forms a temporary opportunity zone. And now, just in front of me, I watched the pounding surf build and fold into this cut, suggesting deeper water below and a desirable target area to cast and sweep our plugs.
Punching a trusted parrot-pattern minnow plug barely 35 yards into the fold in front of me, I almost immediately felt the tap of a missed take. I let the bait suspend a moment as the current swept it back, threw a subtle twitch into the rod tip, and was abruptly bent to the foregrip. The transmission of the first striper headshakes I’d felt in weeks was deeply cathartic as I tried to remember exactly where the strike had come from. As my fish surged toward me on the front face of a wave, I was calculating a hard landing plan in the set of 4-footers curling over my submerged island. “They’re here!” I screamed into the salt spray as I scooted backwards, completely eschewing the surfcaster’s code of silent capture. It didn’t matter… Jimmy couldn’t make out my squawking from a stone’s throw away, but he too had found exultation in the form of a pencil-inhaling bass.
For 20-some minutes in the starless pre-dawn, singles and doubles arrived with regularity. As the soft structure of the current sweep slowly changed course, however, our feedback in the form of bites and bent rods slowly tapered. With the bass actively repositioning, we had to make an educated progression of casts to find the school again. With the outgoing tide close to its nadir, the school seemed to be in tactical retreat. Adjacent to deep-water access, they temporarily stationed near the outer lip of the cut’s entrance. With distance slowly becoming a challenge, we cast bucktails beyond the outer edge and swam jigs along the current’s edge, tempting a few stragglers still searching for an easy meal. The bite shut off shortly thereafter, almost as quickly as it began.
“Stick and move” was the plan to replicate the fragile pattern, so we caravanned to another remote meeting of outflowing tide and onshore gale. As we tramped over the dunes, the early rays of gray light greeted us, quickening our soggy steps. Combing the weed-strewn wash and hauling nothing but water with the same selection of plugs, our progression down the beach almost made us miss a handful of gulls that had begun to stir to our south. Launching airborne off the beach, they slowly circled and nervously hovered in a fashion any angler would recognize, delivering a vital clue. Without a word, we hauled across the tidal flats as fast as our waders allowed and found what I’d been envisioning for some weeks: perhaps not a true foamer, but a self-sustaining group of feeding fish on the surface, somewhere between ruckus and brouhaha on the Wetzel Blitz Scale.
It was full-contact fishing in its finest form, the body of bass drawing us deeper into the nor’easter swell, with the occasional rogue wave making the prospect of lure and leader changes less than ideal. The chaos between breakers was mesmerizing—fish slurping and slapping at peanuts, weaving through the ceiling of white water and flotsam, often ignoring even the best-placed plugs. However, a string of refusals always seemed broken up by a bowed rod and manic battle, one shoulder lowered to absorb the impact of an incoming wave, before a frantic retreat to the shallows for a release. Chafed thumbs, salt-swollen fingers, and one bloody digit a victim of a 2/0 treble gone awry, laughter came easier and easier as the outgoing tide slowed to a dribble. No trophies were had, but it was a rare slice of autumnal striper enlightenment all the same.
While I’d like to think that morning was some higher power rewarding a step outside my comfort zone, I knew it was a dividend earned long ago by my fishing partner. I was just lucky to be along for the joyride.
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