I have been fishing for most of my life.....however not nearly as involved in fishing as I have been the past 10 years since I started fishing for stripers! In my youth I fished mostly freshwater for bass, pickeral, hornpout, perch and sunfish with the occasional flounder/tommycod trips soaking sea worms in a local river near my home. However it was a day 10 years ago that changed my life. I was in the middle of a divorce and as many can attest, I had very little money to do too much with my 2 young sons so most weekends we fished local freshwater ponds with shiners, caught alot of great fish with the little guys and their Snoopy Zebco rods after which we would go to McDonalds and I would buy them each a Happy Meal......those were tough days for me as after laying out for 2 dozen shiners and a couple Happy Meals my budget for the week was pretty much blown......but it was worth it. Anyway, we fished alot me and my boys who, at the time, were about 5 and 6 years old. One day we were at Nantasket Beach and in the water swimming among us were a bunch of schoolie stripers chasing "their" happy meal. The boys were fascinated as was I and they said to me..."Dad, can we try fishing for stripers?". Now I had never fished for stripers and had no saltwater gear or the knowledge of where to begin. The best place I could start was by grabbing some of my Dad's old saltwater rods off the basement wall that had hung there for years unused along with the reels (old Squidders) and the rods were so old they were still spooled with nylon but we headed off to the local bait shop that next weekend to get what I thought we would need to fish when we bumped into a friend of mine named Warren who, after hearing my story and taking a look at the sorry gear in my truck invited us to join him at Hull Gut! He headed home to pick up some more rods and we headed to the Gut to soak some bait......the boys were thrilled and so was I that I had someone helping us along. So after baiting the hooks and getting them in the water it was not long before my oldest exclaimed that he had something on (I thought he had to be snagged on the bottom) so sure enough, as he struggled to reel in the line as I helped him handle the rod in came my sons first striped bass.....just about 18 inches and quite a beautiful fish I thought. Boy! Was I proud! We snapped a quick picture with me and the boys with Larry holding up his first striper and released the fish safe and sound! A short time later my youngest, Nathan, caught his own striper about the same size and again, we quickly snapped a picture of the three of us with Nate holding up his catch proudly! After a few hours, those would be the only 2 fish we caught that day so we packed it in and I thanked my friend Warren for a great and memorable afternoon that I knew I would cherish for a long time! The 2 pictures I have from that day are among my most prized possessions and I get a great feeling looking at the faces of my boys with their fish and looking at how proud I was of them. The kicker is that my boys caught their first stripers long before I ever caught my first. I was hooked myself that day, so impressed by those beautiful fish that I just had to try it myself, and then began an obsession which has just burned deeper into my soul these past 10 years. Striper fishing has given me so many rewards over the last 10 years in the way of great memories with family and friends, and meeting so many great people because of it! So for me.....it is the memory of that day with my boys that leaps to mind first when it comes to great moments on the water!
