On Nantucket Stripers

Every summer my family rents a beach house in the small town of Siasconset on the east end of Nantucket, a dune and moor-infested island thirty miles off the southern coast of Massachusetts. Ostensibly, these reunions honor my late aunt Elizabeth who once owned a saltbox, “MainTop,” on Pochick Street, where she spent summers reading literature, walking bluffs and collecting friends until she wasn’t here anymore. They also are meant to coincide with the annual striped bass migration, a rugged, green-headed gamefish chronically abutting the island’s rips, shoals and sand-to-moraine shoreline as they work their way up the eastern seaboard.

At the age of thirty-five, I caught my first Nantucket striper on a fly. Here are the salient details: A raining morning in June; heavy, outgoing tide; working sinking lines along Muskeget Island’s scoured edge; the quiet instruction of Captain Jeff Heyer. The reason I mention my age is to give a sense of how many years I wasn’t catching them, and also to convince you that it’s never too late in life to try. The remaining details are abbreviated to relay the simple notion that striper fishing need not be unnecessarily complex or irksome, though given personal penchants for inflexibility and penny-pinching, it can be.

First and foremost, timing on the island is important. To avoid the two-month deluge of mid-summer tourists, day laborers and “summering” undergraduates overrunning your favorite watering and striper holes, June and September are worthy considerations. September can blow like hell, June can rain like hell, but during the latter, cool Atlantic waters begin to warm, attracting spearing, sand eels, seabirds, pinnipeds and the season’s first run of decent bass. When located, the fish generally are hungry and agreeable.

Yet finding a striped bass is not as simple as it seems. Unlike their freshwater counterparts, saltwater fish, especially stripers, are continually on the move, feeding, exploring and avoiding predators. By “on the move,” I don’t mean from the boulder’s front to back — think more in terms of miles, not feet. If this fact strikes you as revelatory, don’t feel bad, this misunderstanding perpetuated years and years of fishless outings for my entire family. Just know that as you witness another untouchable, half-acre blitz erupting offshore, you won’t be the first or last beachside angler to mutter, “This is enough, I need a boat.”

And with that, you’ll either purchase a sparkling new center-console, given the resources, or start making arrangements to fish with one of the island’s fine captains. I won’t spend a hundred words listing the reasons you should consider fishing with a veteran guide, but suffice it to say: Even the mediocre ones have forgotten more about tides, weather and striper behavior than you’ll ever assemble in ten lifetimes. You either can pay with painful, fishless years out of your life or your checkbook — the decision is yours.

Finally, be open to new ideas. I had a writing professor once advise me: Your ability to create only is limited by your willingness to experiment. I believe this is true for most endeavors. So last summer, overlooking the break at Surfside, pitching giant, chartreuse plugs into seven-foot rollers, watching large bass materialize within wave-faces to inspect, not eat, my long-distance offerings, I decided it was time for a change.

Thinking of a dry-dropper technique I often used when trout fishing the Rockies, I removed the plug’s hideous hook, attached a small section of shock tippet then trailed a large, green-tinseled fly. It wasn’t long before one of those bass pulled up behind the concoction, flared its gills and inhaled the Mushmouth. Minutes later, as I beached the bass, a local surfer wandered over to survey my tackle and specimen, and after a long look at both, uttered the words, “Dude, I’ve never seen a rig like that!” I took a minute to laugh, then replied, “Neither have I.”