Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  In early spring the presence of bass can rarely be determined from the beach; most often the set is made by old experience or instinct, some indefinable smell or feeling that the fish are there. (The long-nosed Posey Lesters are said to be strangely gifted with this instinct, known to other fishermen as “Posey smell.”) As the water warms in early summer and schools of spearing and sand eels move inshore, gulls and terns attracted to the scraps of bait may indicate a feeding school; sometimes an oil slick from the carnage beneath gives its presence away. When there is fish smell on the wind, it may suffice to set around the dark shadow of a bait school driven into a compact mass by the slashing predators; sometimes the wet sand glistens with a sprinkle of sand eels, or spearing, chased into the translucent surf and cast ashore. Bait chased upward may be seen popping on the surface, and less frequently there are surface breaks—the hunters themselves swirl and are gone. Feeding bluefish—and bonita, too—erupt in sudden bursts of white, while the big bass roll their dorsals out, in heavy whirling.

  In spring, such sign is very scarce, the cold ocean is closed and secretive, most sets are “blind.” And Ted would say, “Better try ’em here, ain’t that right, boys? See how we do.” Or “Boys, ain’t nothin doin here, don’t look like; let’s work back east’rd, hold that Eagle Boat set, try her again this evenin, before supper.” But sooner or later Ted would “smell fish,” sometimes where, for several hours, he had stared at the same faceless stretch of sea. “Let’s try ’em, boys, let’s go, let’s go!” he would yell out, in a sudden hurry, backing the heavy boat trailer down to the water.

  The handling of a loaded dory in the Atlantic surf is a stirring sight, and one not likely to be seen many years longer. “The ability to maneuver a rowboat through breaking waves will soon become a lost art among the Long Islanders,” wrote Captain Josh Edwards’s granddaughter in 1955. “A few men still draw seines for bass … fewer still set trawls for cod from small dories in wintertime, but their ranks are thinning.”1

  In the fifties the boats were backed down to the water on a trailer, but once in the water they were still propelled by oars; the tactics of “going off” through the surf were much the same as those in the days of winter codfishing and shore whaling. Though heavier and a lot more leaky than most of its kind, Ted Lester’s yellow dory was more or less typical, a sturdy high-sided double-ender of soft pine about sixteen-foot long (on the bottom) carrying three men and three hundred fathoms—about eighteen hundred feet—of netting, corks, and leads. The rest of his rig was also fairly standard, and the description of setting net that follows would apply to any of the seven or eight rigs that were active on the ocean beach until motors were put into the dories ten years later.

  When the truck is backed down, the crew heaves up on the dory’s bow to slide her off her trailer into the wash. Prior to launching, the dory is held steady by the crew while the two oarsmen, jumping in, row lightly to set up their timing and keep the bow headed up into the waves. To maintain that timing and be ready to go at a moment’s notice, they must never glance back over their shoulders, nor do they need to, since everything can be read in the faces of the shore crew bracing the stern. One of these men holds the bitter end of a coil of line that will lead from this inshore end of the net up to the winch. As crew leader or captain—ordinarily the man who owns the rig—Ted is studying the seas, which usually arrive in a series of three; he looks for a likely interval, or slatch, between two series. As the third sea breaks, he hollers, “Go, boys!” and the men in the surf shove the dory out through the tumble of white water. In deteriorating weather and an onshore wind, the seas are choppy, with no slatch, and the oarsmen can count on a cold rinse down the neck to keep them lively.

  Unless the sea is very calm, the beach crew shoves until the water is at their chests, at which point whoever will set the net hauls himself over the dory’s stern; if necessary, he may grab up the spare oar to help propel the dory seaward. The oarsmen are rowing mightily, standing up at their seats to hurl their backs into the stroke, yet taking pains not to pop an oar—jerk it out of its oarlock—and spoil the timing; it is these next seconds, in rough weather, that will determine whether the dory will slide up and over the sea already capping or whether the sea will break over the bow into the boat. Filling up—an inevitable experience—means wallowing or worse until the dory can be beached, bailed, and refloated, and is especially disagreeable in the dark of a cold spring or autumn morning. Sometimes the dory will broach to—swing parallel to the wave and capsize, dumping the net—or, worse still, climb the wave too late and pitchpole in a backward somersault, with a great risk of serious injury to the crewmen. In either case, men in heavy waders are floundering in the icy surf, struggling to escape the swirling net.

  Usually the dory goes off in good style, and one of the shore crew drives the truck and trailer to the point on the beach where the boat may be expected to come ashore. (Beach trucks, which range from converted war vehicles to old pickups, are all equipped with four-wheel drive, large semideflated sand tires, and a winch operated by a power take-off gear from the truck’s transmission or by a separate donkey motor with reduction gear that is bolted to the truck bed.) The second vehicle remains at the launching place, hitched to a line that trails out to the moving dory. At its seaward end, the line is bridled to the jack, a stout pole that serves as a hauling purchase and also to spread the cork and lead lines of the net to keep them from fouling, or rolling, in the seas. Once clear of the surf, the man setting net heaves the jack overboard; it is then hauled back into the surf by those on shore to close the net to any fish that might try to slip past, inshore.

  The dory has headed out to sea as the man in the stern pays out the net, heaving out coils of lead line with loud slaps that, in fog, carry back to shore. The cork line follows of its own accord, corks bouncing lightly over the gunwales, as he checks to make sure that the mesh is hanging straight, without a snarl. Still inside the bar, the dory turns parallel to the beach, bearing west in the springtime, east in the fall, in order to draw the net across the path of the migrating fish. Not long thereafter, the bag is set, together with a red or orange buoy to indicate its location to the trucks during the hauling. The bag, or cod end, is a large tubular pocket in the reinforced center section of the net, known as the bunt. As the net is hauled, the trapped fish collect in the bunt and bag, where the twine is necessarily much heavier than it is in the quarters of the net, which adjoin the bunt, and in the wings or outer sections, which are usually tapered toward the jacks so that they will “wade” in shallow water. The net is three-inch “mash”—each diamond-shaped mesh, pulled straight, is three inches long—and the leads are spaced about eighteen inches apart on the wings and about twelve along the quarters.

  Once the bag is set, the net is paid all the way out parallel to the beach, although a slight hook toward shore is often made before the second jack is thrown. This offshore wing is rarely returned close to the surf, not only because heavy net would be dangerous in case of a mishap in landing, but also because the net can be left open a little longer in case fish are still moving down the beach. The offshore jack is secured to a long line coiled in the bilges, which is used for hauling the net and as a safeguard: if the timing is bad on the run for shore, this line can snub off the dory’s headway and haul her back to safety outside the breakers, and it can also serve to keep her stern into the seas so that she will not yaw dangerously, broach to, and capsize.

  “Although the dory is capable of riding wild seas, it is not tolerant of handling error. When nearly empty, it is a skittish platform for experts only …”2

  Timing is critical as the dory nears the breakers. She must ride to shore on the back of one sea without losing headway and wallowing helpless in the trough; but if she rides too far forward on this wave, picking up speed, and plunging down its face as the wave is breaking, she may jam her bow into the sand and pitchpole in a very fast violent forward somersault as the wave carries the stern up and over, bringing
the dory down on the three men.

  On shore, the winch is already started, and a crewman is ready with a haul line to secure to the dory when she comes ashore. Once the dory is committed to the surf, the oars are boated, and the net man does his best to hold the line burning out over the stern. When her bottom strands, the man on the beach seizes the bow and the crew jump out and fight to hold her perpendicular as they rush the empty boat as far as possible up the beach on the next wave, then run a line from a ring bolt in her bow stem up to the winch. Once safely ashore, the boat is spun and hauled stern foremost onto her trailer. Ordinarily the man who sets the net also loads the net into the dory, to make certain it will pay out cleanly and hang properly on the next haul.

  Sometimes at midday in fair weather, the net is left offshore to fish a while, but usually the jack on this open wing is drawn ashore as soon as the boat is beached. With both jacks in the surf and the cork line lying in a half-circle, the winch at the inshore end is started up, and the net is hauled from both ends simultaneously; as the half-circle diminishes, the trucks are moved closer together. Care must be taken that the large red or orange buoy marking the location of the bag stays at dead center, for otherwise the net will lie askew, and the lead lines may be pulled up off the bottom, permitting the quick, nervous fish to slip beneath.

  The net, in hanks, is winched onto the beach by means of a long “whipping line” secured by a nonbinding hitch to cork and lead lines where they come together at the water’s edge; when it nears the winch, this hitch can be cast off quickly and the free end run back down to the waterline and resecured to another length of net. This process, known as tying-on, is repeated until the bunt and bag are just behind the surf. From this point on, unless it is too heavy for five men using the lift of the waves to ease it ashore, the net is “bunted up”—worked in carefully by hand, slacking the strain as each wave rises so that the lead line won’t be lifted off the bottom. The men on each side shout across the surf as they struggle to control the bag, holding the cork lines up and the lead lines down, for whatever fish the net contains are now packed into a small area and would quickly shoot away through any opening.

  Although a few fish may be gilled in the wings and quarters, it is rarely clear until late in the haul whether the crew is “around a charge of fish” in commercial quantity. The men peer into the sea for the first signs of a good haul—fish shadows in the rising wave, a surface whirl, a silver skittering in the wash. “There he is!” somebody yells, and the cry releases meaningless orders, oaths, and imprecations that accomplish little besides easing the suspense. Then the bunt is washed into the shallows. The men seize the heavy mesh and, heaving upward, pour the skittering fish into the bag; soon a hitch is taken, and the bag is winched onto the sand, where the “puckerin string” that ties the bag is loosened, and the bag unloaded. This string is retied as the net is loaded back into the dory, and when fishing is good, the same man always ties, to ensure good luck.

  In early spring there is sometimes a limited market for the blueback (or round or English herring) much valued in Europe, which is the first “money fish” to arrive; black-back flounder, mackerel, and squid also come early. The most valuable spring species are the American shad, the weakfish, bluefish, and the small striped bass.

  Traditionally, the arrival of the shad coincides with the spring blooming of a wild member of the rose family, which is called shad, or shadblow, for that reason, and the adult females ordinarily contain two kidney-shaped sacs of firm, pink-brown roe—the only roe besides that of sturgeon and salmon (and a mushy facsimile produced by the ocean lumpfish) that has any significant commercial value. Sturgeon showed up occasionally in the spring nets—with or without roe for caviar, they have a certain value as smoked fish—and sometimes there were hauls of butterfish and the northern puffer (or bottlefish or blowfish).

  The small striped bass appears on the ocean shore in the last days of April. Not until the time of lilacs in late May or early June, say the old people, will the bluefish arrive, in company with large striped bass, and “the height of the bass” comes later in the month, with the white flowers of the new potato plants. Rounding Montauk Point, the migrant species scatter through the bays and islands. Though some will remain along the ocean shore; many more continue north and east along the New England coast.

  In spring as many as forty species may appear at one time or another in the nets—the thirty-three that I recorded in 1953–1956 did not include the many creatures such as spearing, eels, sand eels, and others that slip easily through the three-inch mesh. The shining heap on the ocean beach, catching the first red of a cold sun that rises in roaring silence out of the ocean, may include small dogfish sharks, big stingrays, skates, assorted members of the herring and flounder families, two species of sea robins, and the angler fish, or monkfish, known to the commercial men as molly-kites; the extraordinary angler lies on the bottom like a large cow patty, waving a yellow flap of skin on its first dorsal spine to attract prey to its huge mouth. Ordinarily large sharks and porpoises rush straight through the net, leaving big holes, but I recall a day when a large thresher shark became entangled. Now and again there is an exotic species such as the spiny boxfish, or porcupine fish. (In the fifties, Suffolk County was still a Republican stronghold—the only county outside Vermont and New Hampshire, it is said, that voted for Alf Landon against Franklin Roosevelt—and these rare, prickly, and inconvenient creatures, together with the horned sculpin, were known to the staunchly Republican fishermen as Democrats.)

  Throughout the spring, the unmarketable herrings—skipjacks, alewives, and menhaden (the menhaden and the closely related skipjack are valuable only in huge quantity)—the delectable sand dab, or daylight flounder (so-called because light can actually be seen through its thin green-spotted disk), the anglers, sea robins, dogfish sharks, the rays and skates, are dumped out of the bag into the shallows. Many strand on the beach or wash ashore again, killed by the nets, and although the gulls, crabs, snails, and sand fleas will put them to good use, the fishermen are blamed for this sad waste that is caused by a fussy American market.

  Captain Ted Lester, when time permitted, would scuttle around the beach, quick as a sandpiper, gathering herring to slip down the throats of our big bass to increase their weight; sometimes he used a water hose for the same purpose, back at the freezer. All the fishermen resorted to such tricks to combat the crooked dealers at the Fulton Market, who not only paid the bare minimum for fish, but sometimes reduced by 10 per cent the weight indicated on the shipped boxes, yelling over the telephone each morning that the fishermen’s scales must all be wrong. “Market don’t give us nothin for thim herrin, boys, but it don’t seem right to let ’em go to waste,” said Ted, whose obsessive energy needed an outlet when there were no “money fish” to lay his hands on. However, not all of the fishermen, even in hard times, would pick up herring left behind by other crews.

  Ted was both thrifty and hard on his gear, which he would patch relentlessly but not replace; his reputation as a scavenger of discarded odds and ends, including trash fish, had won him the nickname Cap’n Seagull. “Out of the fog come Cap’n Seagull and all thim Poseys,” as a Bonac bayman said, in one of the many stories that expressed a kind of carping respect for this driven man. Yet without Ted Lester’s scavenging habit, outsiders such as Scott, Cole, and myself might never have found work on a Lester crew. Until recent years, Ted was the only Posey who would take on “people from away,” mostly because—so his detractors said—outsiders were less likely to resent the makeshift gear that kept his rig in near-constant emergency.

  On June 9, 1954, we made a set just before light east of the boarded-up Coast Guard station at Amagansett, which is the set closest to Poseyville.3 This home set was chosen because the silver truck had broken down, and we had only the Model A to work with. In addition, we had torn up our new nylon bunt on the Erdmann’s set the day before—the captain was furious because Richard and Stewart had put too much strain on the
net when it got mudded—and Ted had replaced it with a bunt of tattered cotton.

  That morning the water’s edge was sprinkled with driven bait, and the light fog was heavy with the sweet oily smell of fish, and we had scarcely begun to haul when the water just inside the corks farthest offshore began to shiver. In the dim light, still uncertain of what we were seeing, unable to believe that the whole crescent of smooth gray sea inside the corks was somehow stirring with uneasy life, we kept on hauling in dead silence, tying on sections of incoming net, trudging up the soft sand hill to the winch to untie the line from the last hank, hurrying back down to the water to tie on again. The fish were showing up too soon, gilled far out on the net’s wings, and very early a fish swirled on the oily surface of the long slow swells. A minute later, when a fair-sized bass actually flipped over the corks, everyone yelled out all at once. The net was scarcely halfway in, and it was already so packed that the roiling bass, seeking escape, could be felt thumping up and down the length of it.

  In the new light, we could see that the water was browning with churned sand, what the fishermen call sand rile. Then somebody yelled out, “They’re going through!”

  We plunged into the surf over the bibs of our heavy waders, struggling to hoist the old bunt out of the water and horse the net ashore at the same time. By now, the whole surface was broken by swirls and slapping tails, and Bill Lester’s crew, sighting the tumult from a mile away at Two Mile Hollow, came burning down the beach from the westward. Seeing the fish going through, they set around us, but even as they backed their dory down into the water, one of Bill’s crewmen, Lindy Havens, was cursing Ted at the top of his lungs: “Goddamn you, Ted! Maybe now you’ll get rid of that old cotton shit, goddamn you!”

  Big Lindy, a tall man with big ears, black-haired country good looks, and a hot temper, had tears of exasperation in his eyes; he felt things strongly. One morning on the beach at Wainscott he offered to throw into the surf our local congressman, who had never helped the fishermen in their struggle to survive in a resort economy, yet had dared to chastise Bill Lester’s crew for setting a net around such an important surfcaster while he was relaxing in the out of doors in his lightweight trout waders. When we came along, Lindy was still hurling obscenities at the empty dunes into which the alarmed legislator had fled.