Everybody remembers their first keeper right? Tell us When,Where, How, What size and any other interesting tid-bits.

Mine came after about 4 years of trying. The limit was 36" but changed to 32" a few years later. Anyway I'm pretty sure the year was 1996 July . I was recovering from back surgery from a ruptured disc and the day the Doc. gave me the O.K. to drive I was down the road to the bait store right after supper that night. I picked up some mackeral and headed to the Cape Cod Canal, east end . It was about slack tide I was to the right of the Sagamore Bridge Mainland side. 20 min. later I hooked up with a 34 " striper and landed it on the rocks. Those rocks were no place to be after having back surgery but I was determined to get to that fish . It was low tide , not to many weeds I just took my time. I was trilled to finally catch one I could take home and cook. I went home and it wasn't even dark yet. That was the best striper I ever ate.

Bruce

Anyone Else?

My first keeper only had to be 16". Can't even remember the year, probably about 1966 or 1967. Bell Road on the Canal, the first light west of the RR Bridge, bouncing sea worms on the bottom on the east tide. Caught on an 8' Berkley spinning rod and a Phleuger spinning reel marketed by Shakespeare.

First 30 and first 40 came from somewhere on the back beach near Baulston or Newcomb Hollow, back in the late 1970s. Still waiting on the first 50. Live eels, old white spiral Lamiglas spinning rod from Murats and a green Penn 704. The rod and reel is on page 96 of Daignault's "20 years" book in someone else's hands.

My first keeper came late afternoon about 3 years ago. I was using the rod that I had made in school. It was summner or autumn. A lot of boat traffic.
So I'm sitting there and a boat goes over my line. Ready to curse the guy out, I pick up the rod to snap it off and the line starts running away from the boat. I set the hook, solid fish on. I fought her for a few minutes and she was in. 31 or 33" I can't remember. It was great.

Can't exactly remember the details because I was way to young but, it was on my dads boat about 1980 (so I was about five) and all I can remember was how cool it was and how BIG! These weren't no punkin'seeds! HA!HA!

I was living and working in Scituate at the time and every day at lunch I would head down to the harbor, grab a sub and park overlooking Peggoty Beach. When I parked that day back in the late 70's, my sub never made it out of the bag. I couldn't believe my eyes as I looked down and the entire cove in front of the beach had spray and jumbo poggies jumping out the water everywhere you looked.

There was one guy on the beach and he already had a 40 lb bass laying on the sand, so I knew this blitz was the real deal. I hit the beach with my 9 foot Penn, Penn 704 or 740 forget and a small supply of atoms poppers. I have never experienced fishing like that before or since. I had a 42 lber on the beach within minutes and continued to catch one monster bass and bluefish after the other. The blues were big as well and every single cast was either a hookup or several hits on the retrieve.

I'll never forget the monster that dwarfed the 40's I caught that day, hit my popper about 10 feet from the beach and I got a good look at her length and girth as she turned and ran. The fish was enormous and after landing two over 50 since, I believe that fish was in the high 50's, maybe even 60+. I don't think I got a good hookup that close and she came unbuttoned after the first run, but I will remember that strike until I'm old and feeble.

First time I've ever left an ongoing blitz, because I was just whipped after 2 hours of nonstop casting and catching. The following year I got a 43 lber off the same beach, but no blitz that day. I got lucky and snagged a live poggie from a small pod that was right up against the beach and for obvious reasons, because that bass hit my poggie the minute I tossed it out about 20 feet.

Hope to get into that type of blitz again, but with the lightening of the length limits, I hope I will be physically able to cast by that time. Tight lines.

I think I was about the same age as Jenn, but it was 1973 or so when I got my first keepers. OF course, the rulz were a little different back then. And I don't actually remember the first keeper as much but I saw some pictures about 15-18 years ago that showed me with "keeper" "Rockfish" . I do remember several times fishing with my father on his '71 Wellcraft V-20 cuddy off the Chessapeke Bay Bridge, Sandy Point, and Annapolis when we would land 50 plus "keeper" "Rockfish" in an afternoon. Of course, those keepers were all "legal fish" in the mid to high teen, low twenty inch range at that time... Does that count :P ??

Now my first "real" keeper was somewhat more elusive as I fished alot in Camp Ellis, Maine when the minimum lengths kept moving around. One year, when the limit was 34" plus, my friend and I caught several fish that were about 33-34" (depending on how we measured them) that we released because the local DEM fellow that was always hanging around the pier would bust our hoo-haas if they weren't an inch over the minumum. He would ALWAYS measure the fish short. Well we had several that summer that were arguably over 34 inches (there was a mangled yardstick nailed on to the floating dock) that we did not keep for fear of getting busted by this guy. He always seemed to be hanging over the upper pier railing whenever we got fish larger than schoolies. I had a "keeper" at 34.5 inches and when I told him to come down to look, he just shook his head and told me to throw it back in >( . We never did get a 35" fish. The next year, we were catching fish to 35" practically all summer long. Of course the minimum was 36" at that time. Fortunately, the DEM fellow was not along as often that next year as he was the summer before, and we did manage some 36" fish that season.

I remember one day that we had just run out of herring and had started to switch to bucktail jigs when a friend had brought down some fresh dead mackeral. But in our experience that year, the mackeral was nearly useless we live-lined it on the boat. After many weeks of fishing one rod herring and one rod mack, nearly all of the fish we ever caught were on the herring. We wouldn't even touch the mackeral, we called it "Fish Reppellent" because it even seemed to slow down our catches on herring. So when this fellow brings down this fresh mackeral, I didn't even want to give it a try. He puts on an unweighted 3" long chunk of mack, casts out 60 feet into the river current
and the INSTANT that chunk hit the water, he was on with a big fish!! We all thought it was a blind luck. The fish came unhooked, he reeled in, rebaited and cast out to the same spot. Whamm!!! Another fish about 34-36 inches (these are big fish for Maine during the daylight). Everyone is razzing me about my term of "Fish Repellent" while all 6 of us race to tie on a hook the fastest and bait up. It's really funny to see a bunch of guys scrambling to tie hooks after using bucktails and then to see everyone alomost simultaneously pull out their bait knifes and attack the same mackeral on top of the pile to get lines out the fastest. We must have looked like the Six Stooges as we got our collective buttocks in gear. Well, we all casted out roughly at the same time, and all of us, as soon as the baits hit the water, give or take a couple seconds, ALL of our rods were curled over on - keeper and near keeper fish. Stripers were reeled in, lines tangled with alot of sharp but still friendly banter amongst us. Fish were quickly measured and released. Casted out again, WHACKED, reeled in and released. For the next 4 casts and catches each, nearly all of us had keeper fish or ones that just missed. I think I had somewhere between 2 to 4 keepers that day as they were all cookie-cutter fish between 35-37 inches with the odd fish at 34 or 38. This was all on cheap K-Mart and Wall-Mart rods with cheap reels. Of course when the people on from the upper pier and the down river dock (Camp Ellis commercial dock had a high fixed pier and two other floating docks attached) they grabbed their rods and came to the dock we were on. Just as it got really crowded (the dock was maybe 30 feet long), the blitz stopped with just a few more fish caught. It was truly a blast :-D

**** Oh, almost forgot, then I met #^&#^&#^&#^&#^&#^& and found out what BIG FISH was all about when I saw his "Wedding Album" full of fish between 30 and at the time 48 POUNDS

Though we lived in PA, we used to vacation in Nantucket with my mom every couple of years. Being an avid fisherkid, I borrowed a surf rod from my uncle to bring up and generally caught a few blues off the surf.

We went up for a week in June of 1984 (I was 14) and I was fishing a bluefish blitz off of Smith Point (for those who know Nantucket, this was before Smith Pt. re-attached to Esther Island, so it was a reasonable walk). Everyone was catching fish! Except me, I had a case of the break-offs likely due to year old line on the Penn I was using. After losing three hopkins (two in fish, one on a cast) I was down to a couple red/white ballistic missiles and some un-named, unknown gray, ranger-like lure that my uncle had thrown in probably 'cause he never used it. The fish were only hitting metal so I went with this gray lure to at least match the color.

On my second or third cast, I noticed a huge fish coming towards my lure right in the wash at the end of my cast. I almost had the lure in so I slowed it down hoping the fish could get to it. It did and the fish just peeled line as it headed for the open ocean. After a great fight, this guy walks down into the surf and grabs the fish and yells, "striper!" He tried to throw it up the beach, but it was too damn big. About 40" and around 25lbs.

Needless to say, I was pretty psyched. It was the biggest fish I'd ever seen. I called my dad and due to cost and logistics of getting the fish back to PA, we (or should I say, he) decided not to get the fish mounted. So, we had bass for dinner the rest of the week. Good stuff!

The unknown lure? I returned it to my uncle when we got back home.

That year at Christmas, I opened a gift to find that he mounted the lure in a small wooden case covered with glass. I bought more hopkins when I weighed in the fish, so that lure never saw the water again. 3 casts, 1 striper... not too bad.

Though, I think I'll attach one of those small metal hammers with a sign, "break glass in case of emergency"... if I ever get into a serious dry spell, I may bust it out.

I actually only fished saltwater one more time before I moved up to Boston in 1995... or 1994... amazing I remember everything about that fish, but not when I relocated to a different region of the country.

Great topic... cool stuff to hear how we all got started.

Those are some good stories . Thanks for sharing them. Happy Holidays