This is a great thread now that I read the responses, thanks to all of you for participating. I love the surf and like Karl said it do cleanse the soul. One thing I like about the beach is the feeling it gives me or should I say the reminder it gives me of how small I am. Being 6'-6" I loose that perspective. As to respecting a beach fish over a boat fish, I don't know. I mean standing in the elemental fury of the surf and playing a big fish is the one way we would all like to claim our fifty but standing on a heaving deck in a hal glae at Sow and Pigs in the middle of the night when the skipper makes it a point to tell you what to do if the boat flips, well that has some merit too. I think a fifty either way are on the same plane as far that is concerned although it took me many years to reach that conclusion and cast away prejudices of one fishing method over another. Where I cast the island shores I do not rely on electronics, actually more on things I gained from shore fishing. Things like moving water, structure etc.
Karl, that New York had some great fisherman as you mention but almost all were pilgrims who made the trek north in response to what the central mass and Worcester crowd first opened up. Alot of the names you mentioned came much later actually in the middle to late fifties, sixties and seventies. I wonder what FD would be doing for the summer if he had had conditions in the 60's and 70's as we have now? Seems he might have had an epiphany of sorts lately from what I hear.
Laine's big secret was he was one of the first and certainly one of the most daring that took a small boat to the beach, launched it in the surf and fished from it on the outside of the bars along Peaked Hill etc. I interviwed the Perry boys years back for an article and their Dad Leo , who was the impetus for the reverse Atom and many squid plugs, fished with Laine all the time and told me how he ( laine) would push off in his skiff with a piece of plywood about six feet long and two feet wide which he would lay on and sleep as he was anchoerd up until the tide was right or after the fishing was done and come ashore at dawn with the skiff loaded with bass while the guys on shore caught nothing.
After it is all said and done both methods have merit and some inherent risks that make both equal on the striper playing fields. I go to the beach still quite often as there is nowhere I would rather fish than on the sands of Truro and P-Town. It is beautiful and there are sights you won't see anywhere else. The clarity of the night sky, the smell, the vista of the mighty Atlantic and the power it holds, the milky way and shooting stars and the endless rythym of the surf as the waves crash to the shore. But is missing something. Occasionally we get a taste and, like seeing a lover we once had and cannot get out of our minds and know we will never have again, it is a place that brings out a memory that cuts a small piece of your heart away each time we go there. Of anything that FD wrote, that sentimentality, and the memory of what once was and will never be again, is the most haunting to anyonme who ever experienced it when it was good.
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