Men's Lives

by Peter Matthiessen

  On this June morning, Lindy’s howl of pain was mixed with Ted’s own anguished screeching and the grinding of truck gears and the thump of soft breaking seas in the morning mist. But it was too late; the old net tore in our hands, and Bill salvaged little from the slapping tumult pouring through Ted’s bunt as most of what Lindy called “the biggest charge of bass I ever seen on this goddamn beach” moved back offshore. All we saved were those fish driven by the others into the heavy mesh of the nylon bag, two tons of cow bass, thirty-three boxes, scarcely a fish less than forty pounds and a good many over sixty.

  The old cotton in the net was shot; the tattered mess was nothing that could be mended, since the twine was rotten (“Twoine’s some tender, ain’t it, Cap?” as the Poseys say, snapping a bar of mash between gnarled fingers). We were out of business for two days while Ted went to Greenport after netting, hung new quarters, and sewed his old bunt into the center, rerigging the cork line and the leads.

  7.

  A Delicate, Fine,

  Fat, Faste Fish

  On Thanksgiving Day, 1923, the keeper of the Montauk Light noticed a big school of striped bass off the rocks; in just over an hour, with fifty-seven casts, he horsed in fifty-six bass up to twelve pounds each. “Striped bass fishing is nowhere better,” the East Hampton Star reported at the end of that season. Yet the bass had been very scarce since the 1880s, and a few years later the species was so rare that its probable extinction was predicted, lending support to a growing movement among sportsmen to eliminate commercial fishing from Long Island.

  As early as 1924, in an amendment to the state marine fisheries conservation law, it was proposed that all dragging or trawling of any kind be prohibited in state waters, and that all other netting be so severely curtailed that, in effect, all fishing except angling would come to an end. Among those who denounced this drastic measure was Captain William Tuthill of Montauk, an old-timer who was able to point to extreme cycles of scarcity in numerous migratory fish species:

  In the year 1870 there was a large run of weakfish at Montauk, but for some unknown reason they never came up bay. In 1906 and 1907 there was another large run of weakfish. But where have the bonitas gone? No one can tell. They may be and probably will be back, because other fish have gone and come the same way. I remember one day off Montauk Point as far as the eye could see in every direction bonitas were jumping out of the water. This was in 1914.… I remember in 1865 there were very few sea bass caught. In 1870 they came on again in large numbers, and in 1890 there seemed to be no end to them.… They were caught off Gardiners Island on October 15. A few days later, we didn’t get a fish. It is just the same with other fish—they come and go, and no man or set of men can control the movements of salt water fish.… Where would the public be but for the net fishermen? They never could have a fish to eat. And yet we have to go to Albany to fight for our rights.

  Eventually the bill was defeated in the legislature by a vote of 45 to 3. The sportsmen’s mutterings continued, however, and a decade later their delegates in Albany were back again with a similar bill: “It shall be unlawful for any person or persons to take fish in any of the tidal waters of Long Island by means of nets, fish pounds [traps], set lines [trawl lines], or beam trawls [dragging], except that minnows or shrimp may be taken for bait.… This act shall take effect immediately.” Other proposed measures that year forbade the sale of striped bass and bluefish under a certain size, and all commercial hand-lining for weakfish in Peconic Bay, where in the years of striped bass scarcity, weakfish sustained a profitable catch in April, May, and June. Eventually this legislation was defeated too, not only because weakfish were plentiful, but because it was clear that recreational fishermen were taking many more than the commercial men. However, very similar attempts to limit the commercial catch were to be repeated with striped bass in the decades to come. As Captain Charles L. Tuthill wrote in the East Hampton Star, Feb. 2, 1934:

  The sports fishing organizations are seeking such legislation here on the east end of Long Island as our people do not want. It affects the freedom of our bays to everybody and permits only such fishing methods as their bill might approve.

  Is it not a fact that those who have been using our bays for generations are better qualified to judge if protective measures are necessary? This sudden fear of our marine resources being abused and exploited by the commercial fishermen is nothing but a state of mind without any foundation in fact, and brought about by propaganda and misguided ideas as to conservation needs. There have been years of plenty and years of scarcity of practically all kinds of migratory fish, which the oldest fishermen can testify to, and why, no man with certainty can tell. We are going to make the prediction that this fine run of weakfish which have been coming for the past few years will turn in some other direction in the not far distant future only to come back again when natural conditions are favorable, and this without any futile attempt at regulation by man.…

  We would like to believe that the anglers’ grievances concerning commercial fishing methods, the supposed need of conservation measures, are due to a lack of painstaking efforts to get at the true facts. But if this is not the case, the only sane conclusion to which we can arrive is that this whole conservation propaganda is nothing more or less than a mask behind which is a desire to monopolize Peconic Bay for sports activities alone.

  In 1934 an anti-netting measure was “narrowly forestalled” in the legislature, according to the East Hampton Star, which made this comment on December 20 of that year: “Last year when there was agitation in the state assembly for various regulatory laws for commercial fishing for the benefit of sport fishing, the assertion was made that all trap fishing should be stopped on the south shore of Long Island, as they were catching such huge quantities of fish that they could not survive. Investigation of the true condition disclosed that there were only a few traps and that they did not take in a week the quantity taken by the sports in a day. A suggestion to stop hand-lining up-bay during spawning season of the weakfish, on the other hand, met with loud opposition from the sport boat captains. It all depends on whose bull is being gored.”1

  Nevertheless, large commercial hauls continued to outrage the recreational angler, and particularly that species called the surfcaster, whose primary habitat in New York State is the coastal stretch of rock and beach on both sides of Montauk Point. Except for the experts, surfcasting for stripers is one of the least efficient methods of angling ever devised, due to the self-imposed limitations of the caster. He cannot, first of all, reach the more productive depths available to a man trolling from a boat. Also, his range is much more limited, and his lure spends less time actually at work. Even when a fish is hooked, it must be landed through the rocks or surf and is therefore lost at least as often as it is brought slapping from the water. The expert, of course, can reach out farther and place his lure just where he wants it, at a known rock or hole or eddy, and he does not waste time casting blindly but moves from one known spot to another. It is said, with some justice, that 5 percent of the surfcasters catch 95 percent of all fish taken from the shore.

  Even for he who spends months or years, often at night or in foul weather, lashing the water white in quest of a large fish tasting of iodine that has already cost him a great amount of time and money, this sport has an uncanny attraction. The unseen quarry and mysterious dark water, the pleasure taken in the strong and skillful cast, the sound and smell of sea and weather, the healing solitude, and the suspense, are reward enough to the true sportsman who seeks no profit from his hobby, and surfcasting for striped bass probably claims more fanatics than any other form of saltwater fishing.

  Whether novice or expert, surfcaster or boatman, the angler reacts to a truckload of big “trophy fish” as a gourmet might to a trashcan full of caviar, and his distress is understandable, though not well-founded. His wily foe loses dignity in the mass, especially if the angler has passed the whole of a rainy night without a strike only to be confronted at daybreak with
a bag of stripers as large, or larger than his car. In that bag, it seems to him, gasps “the fish that had my name on it,” and even in years when bass are plentiful, he interprets the large haul, not as good news of bass prosperity, but as evidence of exploitation and overfishing.

  In fact, however, there have rarely been more than eight or ten haul-seine crews at work in one season on all of the South Fork, and few if any farther to the west. This is mostly because—on this hundred-mile beach—there are so few places that it pays to fish. To the west, the fish migration along shore is too sparse to justify the effort; to the east, near Montauk Point, rocks and sunken ships, struck on the bar and emerging intermittently in the wake of storms, have become obstructions, known as hang-ups or fasts. There are also stretches where storm has carved away the sloping sand, leaving a beach too steep to work from, and mudholes, where the seine is fouled by storm-exposed peat from an older shoreline farther out to sea.

  Therefore the seiners are confined to specific locations, or sets—the Georgica set or the Ditch Plains set or the Eagle Boat set2 or the Towers set off the ITT radio towers on the Napeague stretch, still known from the days of the old fish depot platform as Napig Station. (One set in this stretch was spoiled by the crash of a 707 in the sixties, the motors of which emerge as hang-ups to this day. Bill Lester agreed to haul seine for the bodies, and landed parts of more than one: “Supposed to get paid for ’em, too,” he says today. “Ain’t paid me yet!”)

  Excepting a clear mile of Napeague Beach, east to Hither Plains, there are only a half dozen places between Amagansett and the Point where a net can be put with confidence into the water. There are three sets in Amagansett, then another clear stretch of East Hampton beach from the Eagle Boat set west of Two Mile Hollow Road to the old “Pots ’n Kittles” whale works location off the middle of Hook Pond. There is also a clear stretch at Wainscott, and a few good sets at Sagaponack, Mecox, and Flying Point, in Southampton Town. But many of these locations are considered dead spots, while other spots “where the bait seems to lay or somethin” produce fish year after year. Probably there are no more than eighteen good sets in all of the thirty-one miles of beach between Shinnecock Inlet and Montauk Point.

  (The term “set” also refers to the direction of the longshore current, which is much increased by wind. Unless wind from another quarter rises to check it, an easterly or westerly set can run for days at a time, roiling the channel between the beach and the outer bar. Even in otherwise fair weather, when a dory can go off safely, a strong set eliminates beach hauling, since it pulls the net sideways down the beach and washes it ashore.)

  In September the striped bass regather, on their way to winter grounds. Once in the ocean, the bass move gradually southwestward; the great body of fish passes mostly outside the bar, moving inshore only irregularly. In a long warm fall of steady weather, haul-seining may be very good (although a dry haul, with scarcely a fish of any kind, is not uncommon). But autumn storms limit the fishing, and an average of four work days a week is probably high. Since the number of sets is very limited, since the seine works only during the time it takes to haul, and since there may be no weather for hauling for days at a time, one can understand the haul-seiners’ conviction that these few hours out of every week scarcely diminish the migrating schools. On the other hand, after World War II, numerous anglers became adept at hooking bass with baits, jigs, plugs, lures, and live eels, and both boatmen and surfcasters began selling their fish, until many more bass in the commercial markets were being caught by hook and line than were caught in nets. Under the circumstances, the commercial men found it difficult to understand the unrelenting attitude of certain sportsmen, whose hostility seemed to grow as the bass increased.

  Entirely oblivious to the controversy is the placid and handsome marine vertebrate known in the South Atlantic states as the rockfish, or rock, and in the Northern states as the striped bass. The biologist classifies Morone saxatilis as an anadromous and tolerant member of the family Serranidae, or sea bass, a group that includes the anadromous white perch of the coastal ponds and is closely related to freshwater perches. By anadromous is meant the characteristic of ascending from salt into fresh water to spawn. By tolerant is meant a considerable adaptability to a wide variety of conditions, including changes in salinity and temperature, turbulence, man-made pollution, and food. (Though they favor small fishes, striped bass also eat lobsters and crabs, soft clams and mussels; while in the estuaries, they are partial to Nereis worms.) An early—and striking—example of striped bass tolerance was the shipment by rail in 1879 and 1881 of a total of 435 small fish from New Jersey to California for transplanting in San Francisco Bay. Within two decades, the commercial landings of a species heretofore unknown in the Pacific totaled 1,234,000 pounds, and the bass has since spread to southern California and to British Columbia.

  Left to itself, this strong silver-white fish with black lateral stripes from gills to tail (the dorsal area is often greenish, and the silver scales glint with tints of brass) aspires to an age of thirty and a weight of 125 pounds. Its broken stripes tend to blur and fade with age, and a larger fish often acquires a pot belly. Widely celebrated as splendid game and table fish, these mighty bass are known to awestruck anglers as stripers, greenheads, lunkers, line-siders, soakers, tackle-busters, and the like. Since almost all of the big fish are aging females, they are known to the commercial men as cows.

  More than a few of the larger specimens have little more fight than a foul-hooked copy of the Sunday New York Times, with taste to match. Nevertheless, their great weight and thrash, in conditions of surf and boiling rocks, make them a redoubtable foe when hooked from shore. Armored by thick scales and gill plates and propelled by a strong heavy tail, the bass is beautifully designed for rough white water, and seeing one whirl out to strike a lure will make a man a surfcaster for life. The small bass (five pounds and under in market terms; the medium bass is five to fifteen pounds, and the large bass is any fish above that size) is vigorous and very tasty; it has been called the most desired food and game fish on the Atlantic coast.

  Sport-fishing writers habitually refer to stripers as wily, crafty, even wise, and although this wisdom might also be perceived as lethargic indifference to lures, live baits, or other enticements designed to remove them from their natural environment in river estuaries and along the coast, the commercial men also will testify to their sagacity; the bass, they say, is the first species to find its way out of a fish trap, and the first to escape through any opening when a net is hauled.

  ———

  On the Atlantic coast, the hardy bass is found not only in estuaries, bays, and along the ocean shore, but as far inland as it can swim up any stream that empties into the sea. It ascends the Hudson 160 miles to Albany, and it is also found three hundred miles inland at Rhodes Landing, Georgia, as well as in the Santee-Cooper Reservoir, in South Carolina. There Lakes Marion and Moultrie, created in 1941 by a federal power project and invaded by the ubiquitous bass by way of the Pinopolis locks on the Cooper River, yielded a conservative estimate of 100,000 pounds to astonished anglers in the three months preceding Christmas 1954. Since they now spawn there, it can be assumed that the bass readily become landlocked fish, with no biological dependence on salt water. By comparison, the anadromous Atlantic salmon is so intolerant of dams and pollution that it has vanished from almost all of its ancestral streams.

  Striped bass spawn in a shifting and variable environment where the salt tides meet the freshwater spring rains in the large estuaries. A successful spawning, producing what biologists call a dominant year-class, depends upon a complex balance of conditions, including rainfall, salinity, water temperature and cleanliness, available nutrients, wind, currents, and weather, and the fact that one female may lay several million eggs is less significant in the survival of the species than the aquatic conditions that surround the hatch and determine the ratio of survival. But the long-lived bass is well adapted to patterns of drastic population fluct
uation. For a decade or more it may all but disappear; then, in a single spawning season when conditions are harmonious, a relatively small number of adult females may produce an immense stock of new fish.

  Striped bass spawn in the spring at the freshwater-saltwater interface of major estuarine systems. Probably no aquatic environment is as variable from one year to the next … in response to spring freshwater flow.… The chances for annual spawning success in such an unpredictable environment are relatively poor, with the high probability that there will be far more poor years than good ones. Therefore, in order to survive as a species, it had to become long-lived and very fecund, so that it could sustain itself for ten to fifteen years at a time—if need be—between successful spawning years. Historical records seem to bear this out. Prior to 1900, there are reports of both scarcity and abundance. In fact, the N.Y. State Fish Commission, about 1895, noted that because bass were so scarce at the time, a hatchery at Cold Spring Harbor was recommended. We know from personal knowledge and commercial fishing statistics that there have been extreme population cycles throughout this century.3

  Populations of bass at the north and south ends of its long range—the Canadian populations from Quebec southward, and also those from southern North Carolina to north Florida and in the Gulf of Mexico west to the Mississippi—are mostly estuarine and riverine in habit and do not appear to migrate, although some will ascend hundreds of miles upriver in the spawning season. There are also nonmigratory populations in the Chesapeake and other areas in the center of the range. But for reasons not well understood, large numbers of Mid-Atlantic bass from Cape Hatteras to the Hudson, and particularly from Chesapeake Bay, move out of the estuaries to travel north and south along the coast. The great majority of these migratory fish are females between two and four years old. Small school bass, appearing on the east end of Long Island in late April, are followed in May by the medium fish; the large bass, most of them spent spawners, do not ordinarily appear until early June. By early July, the migration has passed to Massachusetts and the Gulf of Maine, leaving small concentrations in such sportsmen’s haunts as Montauk Point, Block Island, Watch Hill, Point Judith, Cuttyhunk, Nantucket, and Cape Cod.