Not a striper story but bluefish. The last day of the Vineayrd derby, 1985, I caught a 17.60 lb. chopper on a Spofford's Ballistic Missile orange in color, three hours before the derby ended. The one thing I remember the most though was how the longer I held the fish the more heavy I estimated its weight to be. By the time I walked through the weigh-in shack door I was sure it was going to top out at 20 lbs. at least. I wasn't upset at what it did weigh for sure. It just causes me to chuckle to myself whenever I think about it.
The other thing about weiging in that fish was the weigh-master kept putting it on the scale and then taking it off, and everytime that happened the fish weighed 5 or 6 hundeths of a pound less. It finally dawned on me he was feeling the belly to see if it had any foreign objects in it. I finally got the nerve to speak up and said cut the fish open if you want, but stop putting the fish on the scale and taking it off because it weighs less everytime you do it. He eventually handed it to me and said nice fish. When I was handed my weigh slip I looked at it and then looked at the leader board and realized I knocked off the number one person in my category, a Mr. Granger. So if you can read this Mr. Granger I'm sorry I bumped you out of first place with a fish weighing in at only 17.60, because at one point I could have sworn it weighed 20 lbs.
It is better to have fished and lost than never to have fished at all. "me"