[Big Vern]

Reflections on a Season

As I sat in my office peering out the window watching the wind whip up whitecaps inside Boston Harbor, I came to the realization that I probably won’t be chasing stripers anymore this season. Yesterday’s storm and the ongoing blow have surely pushed the stripers further south than I’m willing to drive in November. Furthermore, checks of weather.com feature a Nor’Easter steaming our way to spell a certain switch from my surf rig to my snowboard. I knew all of this was inevitable, but this was my first “real” season hunting the wily and elusive linesiders, and I’m hooked in a bad way.

Frankly, May can’t come soon enough. It really hurts to rinse the plugs, clean the reels, and stow the whole lot away for the winter. My prospective forays into custom rod building and plug making represent a meager substitute for the feeling of a cow tugging at the end of my line. Nevertheless, I know that all of the fish that I put back this year are going to venture south, feast along the way, breed, and swim back bigger and stronger than when we last met. I will be right here waiting. Only, this time, I’ll be better equipped and more knowledgeable, thanks in large part to the good anglers here at striped-bass.com.

Learning has resulted in an obsession bordering on feverish. Well…my fiancé would probably say that it’s a little more than bordering, but I like to think I’ve got my life very much in check. I’ve been catching stripers for years, but I’ve never hunted stripers in the way that I do now.

I spent every summer of my life until I was twenty-three living on Cape Cod. My folks have a place steps away from a private marina that I’ll confidently nominate as one of the best schoolie spots in the world. When I was about ten years old, an old-timer from the neighborhood showed me how to fish for the stripers you could see bathing in the security lights. After that, all I can remember is walking down there anytime after dark and landing a few eighteen inchers before they spooked. Keepers rarely, if ever, came, and I never really caught anything beyond a schoolie before this season.

Sure, I saw some big fish on a few boat trips with a family friend who was a passionate angler, but my strategy never really radiated beyond the docks. However, in one summer, I went from clueless to taking twenty-five pounders from both the boat and surf on nothing but my own knowledge and skill. I can’t believe the metamorphosis myself. Yet, I know it all stems from the research, reading, and practice of the previous months. A swivel and leader replaced tying direct. Big, funky, wooden plugs and strange looking pieces of rubber flooded a newly acquired plug bag, and all of a sudden I couldn’t have enough rods and reels. Consequently, I think I financed an addition on the local tackle shop. I passed many hours standing waist deep in the coastal waters of the cold Atlantic eagerly tracking my plug as it swept over the edge of a bar. Even more time ticked by as I steadied myself dangling sand eels during another boat drift in some striper rich waters. Out of all this, I came away with a fundamental understanding of the striped bass, its habits, the techniques employed to take them.

Practice blossomed into rabid success with the complement of unrelenting research. The books Striper Surf and Reading the Water were perhaps the single best helps I’ve had yet, but striped-bass.com ranks a close second. Between them and a subscription to On the Water, I feel that any aspiring angler with some resolve can be in the position to haul in a trophy.

Even still, as far as I’ve come this year, next year can only be better. I’ve already set goals of breaking the thirty pound mark and bettering my 14th place bluefish run at the MSBA tournament. Aside from that, I just want to throw myself into my new obsession, and grow from another season casting my bait. I started from scratch, and became a striper fisherman between July and today. I can only imagine what the coming seasons and tides will bring me.