“Well,” he said, “my brother-in-law and I got about thirty between us in a couple hours this morning.”
“Thirty in two hours,” I repeated. Rip, I knew, did not exaggerate. I did the math. Fifteen fish per hour between the two of them. One striper every eight minutes per fisherman. That’s about as fast as you can throw out a fly and haul in a strong fish. “That,” I said, “is lots.”
“Big ones, too,” he said. “We landed three keepers, saw several others. Of course, we didn’t actually keep ’em. They’ll be back again tomorrow. Anyway, there are plenty of others. We saw, I don’t know, hundreds of fish. But who knows how long it’s gonna last? I haven’t seen stripers like this for twenty-five years.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You said you got thirty this morning?” I looked at my watch. “It’s still this morning.”
“This isn’t morning,” Rip said. “Hell, it’s—what?—almost ten-thirty. The sun’s high in the sky. This is the middle of the day. Fishing’s no good now. We quit hours ago.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “You got me. Where and when?”
“Tomorrow at the Duxbury launch. Four o’clock.”
“Four a.m. you mean.”
“If we’re on the water by four-fifteen,” he said, “we’ll hit it perfectly.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said. “You live there. Me, I’ve gotta drive two hours.”
“I released one that measured forty-one inches,” said Rip. “Dropped a little chartreuse-and-white bucktail in front of this shadowy wake and she just finned over to it and opened her mouth and sucked it in. About a foot of water. All hell broke loose. But, hey, if you’d rather sleep in … ”
“I’ll be there,” I said. “You know I will.”
In those days I generally went to bed around midnight, read myself to sleep, and woke up around seven. But after dinner the night before my rendezvous with Rip, I loaded my gear into my car, set my alarm for 1:30, and went to bed. Naturally, I lay awake imagining myself casting to giant wakes in shallow water. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I let myself fall asleep, the alarm would fail to wake me up.
I stared into the darkness until around one in the morning. Then, I got up, put on the coffee, and fried myself some eggs and bacon. I left my house a little before two for the long drive-in-the-dark to Duxbury.
I found myself feeling quite virtuous about it, too. The houses and gas stations along the roadways were darkened, and I figured the occasional other vehicle I saw on the highway was headed home. They were at the end of something. Me, I was at the beginning. I had the jump on everybody.
When I got there, Rip was already messing around in his boat. He looked at his watch and said, “Let’s get going.” He made no mention of my virtue.
We rigged our rods by flashlight, and then Rip cranked up his outboard and maneuvered his boat among the black silhouettes of the sailboats and yachts that were moored in the harbor. A bell buoy clanged hollowly in the misty darkness. Gulls and cormorants perched on the pilings.
We cleared the harbor as the purple sky was beginning to fade to pewter, and we beached Rip’s boat on a half-tide mud flat just as the first pale blush of pink appeared on the eastern horizon.
We stepped out of the boat. Rip pointed. “There,” he whispered. “Let’s go!”
It took a minute for my eyes to adjust. Then I saw them. Wakes. Swirls. Shadows. Here and there, a fin breaking the surface. Stripers, big ones, cruising the flats chasing bait and grubbing for worms and crabs.
In my youth I was a confirmed Night Person. I did my most creative and efficient work in the blackest hours after midnight. I went to bed late and slept late, and that didn’t even count the parties.
As I grew older it changed. For a while, I was a Morning Person. Nothing ridiculous. Seven to noon saw me at my best, such as it was.
Now I don’t know what you’d call me. A Daybreak Person, maybe. I want to be outdoors at first light, the magic hour before sunrise. I want to be there when it happens, and I’m willing to give up a night’s sleep for it.
That morning many years ago with Rip Cunningham made me a convert. Oh, I still need a reasonable hope for good fishing. You can’t talk me into getting up to meet a six o’clock tee time, or to go jogging, or to catch a commuter train.
But if you put a mug of black coffee in my hand and remind me of what it’s like just when the sky fades from purple to gray and the stars begin to wink out and a thin mist blankets the water’s surface, if you help me remember the way Bighorn brown trout sip Trico spinners on a late-August dawn, or how largemouth bass hump and slosh in weedy coves at first light in July, I’ll be there. You won’t have to ask me twice.
Fred Jennings guides for stripers in the tidal creeks that fill and drain the marshes along the Massachusetts north shore. He follows the tides in his canoe and catches striped bass on trout-weight rods. Fred has devised an algorithm for predicting how good the fishing will be, a complicated factoring of variables that include tide, sunrise, moon phase, season, wind direction, air and water temperatures, and a few mysterious unknowns that he doesn’t share. He calls it the Estimated Fishing Quality Index—EFQI. As far as I can determine, the key variable is time of day, and the prime time of day is daybreak. What Fred calls “peak dawns” or “magic mornings” occur when the sun rises precisely three hours after the turn of the high tide.
He wants to be in his canoe an hour before that.
Fred’s guide fee follows a sliding scale depending on the day’s EFQI. I know of no other guide who does this, but it makes sense. He charges most for a peak dawn—a “platinum morning”—when tide and time line up perfectly. Supply and demand, explains Fred, who’s an economist by trade. By his calculations, only twelve platinum mornings occur between May and October, one every two weeks, and those are the days that everybody who reads his EFQI charts wants to book.
I’ve left my house at 2 AM several times for a rendezvous with Fred Jennings to witness a peak dawn on his marsh. The water lies flat calm under a wispy blanket of mist, and feeding stripers leave wakes and swirls around the clam flats and against the mud banks. It is, truly, magical.
It stands to reason that fish are happier, less guarded, hungrier, and more aggressive at first light after the lulling comfort of darkness. Nighttime shelters them from their predators. Water temperatures cool down to their comfort zones. Insects and baitfish are slow and naïve and vulnerable in the early hours. Fish—saltwater and freshwater alike— are ready to go prowling in that marginal time between night and day.
But it’s more than that. Fishermen are energized and predatory, too. Or at least this fisherman is.
Somehow the world feels a lot different—more alive, more optimistic—when I’m leaving for an outdoor rendezvous before dawn on a summer’s morning than it does when I’m coming home at that time.
“The morning,” said Thoreau, “which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.”
Rip and I immediately got into fish in the gray half light. Then he stopped casting and whispered, “Lookit that.” He pointed to the east.
I looked just in time to see, suddenly and all at once, the sun crack the line between ocean and sky. It was like turning on the lights. Day—literally—broke, and the night was abruptly and entirely gone, and I found myself smiling, because I was there, and you weren’t.
Silence on the Flats
I was standing up on the casting platform of Captain Dexter Simmons’s 18-foot Flatsmaster, 8-weight fly rod in my right hand and a size-2 Del Brown’s Merkin pinched by the bend of the hook between the forefinger and thumb of my left. I was bent tensely forward at the waist, left foot ahead of right, rocking with the boat’s movement as Captain Dex, my guide, who was perched high on his poling platform behind me, pushed us over the flats. We were nosing into both the soft wind and the outgoing
tide. We expected the permit to be facing the same way we were moving, cruising the shallow water, looking to intercept any unfortunate crabs—including the odd size-2 Merkin—that might come bumping along the bottom to them. We hoped to sneak up behind them, spot them before they spotted us, and drop a fly in front of their unsuspecting noses.
The mid-day sun hung high and hot overhead. There wasn’t another boat in sight. Nothing at all except us and a few pelicans. The empty flats stretched from horizon to horizon. The ocean was a great flat dinner plate washed in myriad shades of azure and aquamarine under the big bowl of a pale, cloudless January sky. I wore a short-sleeved shirt, quick-dry pants, billed cap, sunscreen. Snowbound New England was far behind me, and I was thrilled just to be there with a fly rod in my hand.
Key West in early January was a winter getaway for Vicki and me after a nasty New Hampshire December and, for that matter, a bad year in general. I had assumed the flats would be barren and had not expected to go fishing.
But Captain Dexter assured me that there were fish. The water temperatures had been favorable. He’d been seeing some bonefish. On New Year’s Day a client caught a 7-pounder, in fact. There had been decent numbers of permit. And there were always barracuda and jacks and ladyfish and other fun species, if you weren’t too snobby.
I told him I wasn’t snobby at all, but permit were sure intriguing.
We talked in quiet voices for a while, getting acquainted— family, mutual friends, striped bass, permit flies, the relative merits of Sage, Winston, and Orvis rods—our eyes all the while scanning the water, looking for fish. Dex talked about tides and cold fronts, moon phases and barometric pressure, the way bait and bonefish and permit moved onto and off the Key West flats in the winter. I talked about New England trout streams and bass ponds. He’d grown up in Rhode Island, but that was a long time ago. He said he sometimes missed the winters.
Gradually we lapsed into silence. We were, after all, permit hunting, and it was a serious business that demanded our full attention. Even under ideal conditions, we wouldn’t expect to see a lot of fish, and we knew that we wouldn’t get many shots at those that we did manage to spot. Even if Dex saw them early, I cast quickly, and my shots were accurate, we understood that very few permit agreed to eat flies, no matter how well they were cast and how closely they resembled crabs.
Thomas McGuane wrote: “What is most emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences—the unproductive periods. For the ardent fisherman, progress is toward the kinds of fishing that are never productive in the sense of the blood riots of the hunting-and-fishing periodicals. Their illusions of continuous action evoke for him, finally, a condition of utter, mortuary boredom.… No form of fishing offers such elaborate silences as fly-fishing for permit.”
We expected no “blood riots,” but we did hope to spot some fish. That would get our own juices boiling. Meanwhile, we hunted in silence.
Captain Dexter’s job was to move us across the flats and to locate the permit before they located us. My job was to see the fish, if not before Dex did, then certainly when he pointed them out to me, and then to make one good cast, close enough to the fish that it would see the fly, but not so close as to spook the ever-spooky permit. One good cast was all it would take. One cast is usually all you’d get.
I was obsessing about seeing, and about the frustration of looking without seeing, fighting the boredom of looking hard for a long time and seeing nothing. It had been over three years since I’d hunted for fish on the flats, and I’d left my permit eyes back in Belize. If my eyeballs were biceps, I’d’ve been flexing them, straining to see, looking hard through my polarized glasses to separate the surface ripples and the wavering turtle grass and the shimmering underwater shadows from the ghosty movements and undulating shapes of the permit that I desperately wanted to see.
Sometimes, I remembered, they just materialized there, with their black backs and sickle tails, conjured up by the sheer force of my imagination—because I wanted to see them, because I was afraid of missing them, because I believed that if I looked hard enough for long enough my diligence would surely be rewarded.
Mostly, those fish I saw were illusions, and I had learned not to mention them. The flats are densely populated with illusions.
And then suddenly Captain Dexter broke our long silence.
“Okay, we got permit,” he whispered. “Eleven o’clock. Eighty yards. Moving right. Two—no, three fish. Nice ones.”
And I flexed my eyeballs, and… no, I saw nothing but turtle grass and ripples.
“I don’t see ’em.” I could hear the desperation in my voice. “Where—?”
“One o’clock now,” said Captain Dex, his voice surprisingly calm. I’d heard the stories about the Key West guides, how they yelled and cursed and sulked when their clients screwed up. But Dex wasn’t like that. “Look, there,” he said, and he pointed with his pole. “Seventy-five feet now, turning this way. See ’em?”
Yes! “Okay,” I said. “Got ’em!” Suddenly they were obvious, and once I saw them, I couldn’t understand how I’d ever failed to see them, and I locked on them, those shimmering shapes, those elusive shadows that I knew I’d lose if I looked away for just an instant.
Spotting those permit and finding myself within fly-casting distance of them seemed, all by itself, like a triumph. We’d been out there on the flats for well over an hour, straining our eyeballs under the high January sun in that long silence. Now we had fish.
Dex pivoted the boat subtly, putting the three permit at eleven o’clock so that he would not be in line with my backcast. The fish were poking along close to the bottom, more or less side-by-side, moving slowly. Looking for bait, I thought. Happy, hungry fish. Fish that might be willing to eat a well-cast size-2 Del’s Merkin.
I had told Dex—it came out as a kind of confession—that I’d never actually caught a permit. I’d hunted them several times from the casting platform of a flats boat. I’d had shots at permit. I’d messed up some of them, spooking the fish. Mostly, they’d simply ignored my flies, or had failed to locate them. But I’d seen fish turn on my fly, too, and once, in Belize three years earlier, on a gray morning on a half tide near the shoreline of a mangrove cay—every detail of that encounter remains vivid—a permit ate my crab fly, and I’d felt the power of his round body as he sliced across the flats, headed for the reef. I’d managed to turn him short of the coral head that surely would’ve cut my leader, and I’d bullied him close to the boat, and he was silvering on his side, beaten, barely waving his tired tail, when he came unbuttoned, and my line went slack, and he slowly righted himself and swam away.
It was a terrible story, and I hated to tell it, but it was my only permit story, and its punchline was: “Bad knot.”
The permit were 60 feet away now, coming straight at us.
“Now,” whispered Dex.
I rolled out a cast, let the line pull the Merkin from my fingers, one hard backcast, a mistimed haul on the forecast, and my line and weighted crab fly flopped out there … 20 feet short, knocked down by the breeze and my own buck fever.
“Again,” said Dex, and I heard no exasperation whatsoever in his voice.
I took in line, lifted, double-hauled, and the line rolled out, cutting through the wind in a tight loop.
“Yes,” hissed Dex. “Good. Wait… now strip.”
When I reached to strip, I saw that the running line had come up against my stripping guide in a knotty tangle. I tucked my rod into my armpit and picked desperately at the coil. If a permit took my fly now, he’d either break off or that knotted line would rip the guides off Dex’s rod.
“Strip,” repeated Dex, and this time I heard something in his voice. “He’s looking at it. Come on. Strip!”
I tugged again at the knot, got it loose, gripped the rod, stripped.
“Nope,” said Dex. “Too late. He gave it a look, then turned away.”
“Oh, man,” I said. “That was a good shot. I’m sorry. If my line had
n’t gotten tangled… ”
“Hey,” he said. “They’re permit. He probably wouldn’t’ve eaten it anyway. They usually don’t. Let’s go find another one.”
We hunted until the tide flattened out, and we saw several more permit, got a couple of decent shots, no bad screw-ups, but no takers, either, no blood riots. Mostly, we drifted across the vast empty flats in long comfortable silences, just happy to be there.
Turkey Bones
When Keith called from Maine, I figured it meant he had stripers on his mind.
What he said was: “Tomorrow.”
“The boat landing?”
“Four o’clock.”
“AM or PM?” I said, the only response that might forestall a hangup.
“PM.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Tide,” he elaborated, and hung up.
Keith had already untrailered and loaded his camouflaged duck boat at the landing when I got there. I grabbed my gear from the back seat and went down to the water’s edge. I frowned and pretended to look around. “Where’s the damn boat?”
It was our old joke, and he grinned quickly, then jerked his head at the 9-weight fly rod I was carrying. “I see you brung your toy rod.”
Another of our old jokes, which he thought was funnier than I did.
“I can land a keeper on this,” I said.
“Well, suh,” he said, “I surely do hope you can. Course, you’ve gotta hook one, first.”
Keith and I climbed into his duck boat, and he steered it through the marsh and up a meandering tidal creek. We made jokes about being invisible, and we reminisced about how the 5-horse Johnson motor had never failed us, well, except for that one time a few Decembers ago when we were hunting eiders out on the bay and the ice storm came in.
“She’s totally dependable in good weather,” Keith said. “Like some fishing partners I know.”
Finally, unable to restrain myself any longer, I said, “So you found a hot spot, huh?”
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