Home freezing invariably damages food. As the food freezes, the water in it expands and breaks the cell walls. The slower the freezing, the worse the damage, and your average home freezer can turn that lovely, firm flesh mushy and dry. Because texture is a big part of what makes striper such a fine eating fish, I’d always given away any excess striper we found ourselves with, rather than turning it into sad, mealy striped bassicles.

This year, as we landed fish after fish, each yielding about five pounds of meat, I started looking at it differently. Not only did we have a lot more fish than we had last year, we had one of those food-saving vacuum-seal gizmos, which, while it won’t stop the textural damage, should slow further deterioration from freezer burn.

Striped bass with black bean sauce

There’s no doubt that a frozen filet would never be as good as a fresh one, but I decided that just meant we shouldn’t grill it and do the comparison. I’d use the frozen stuff in stews and soups and, come January, I’d be damn glad to have a supply.

But I was curious, and I couldn’t wait. So last night I made striped bass with black bean sauce.

It was really collards and onions with black beans sauce, topped with striped bass. Normally, I’d cut the fish into chunks and add it to the vegetables, letting it cook in the sauce, but I wanted to get some idea of how different the frozen fish was from the fresh, so Kevin Iron Cheffed it separately.

Iron Chef is our wintertime grilling facsimile. We take a cast-iron pan with the little ridges on the bottom (we have one for fish, one for meat), and put it under the broiler, empty. When it’s very, very hot, we add the fish. The hot pan cooks it from the bottom while the broiler cooks it from the top. Six minutes later, we have perfectly cooked striped bass.

It certainly looked good.

Kevin plated our dinner. Rice, then vegetables, then fish, then a drizzle of sauce.

I cut into the filet. It didn’t have the same glistening moistness of fresh, but it definitely hadn’t dried out. I tasted it. It was good. Very good, even. The texture had suffered, and it lacked that certain unctuous something, but it still had its mild flavor and thick flake.

Can you freeze striped bass? You most certainly can. And a good thing, too, since we’ve got about thirty meal-size packets of it in the basement freezer. It’s not even January, and I’m damn glad to have it.

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The huge fish that I fought for a good five minutes, and brought right up to the boat, escaped when the knot I had tied, attaching hook to leader, came unknotted just as Kevin was reaching into the fish’s mouth to bring it aboard. He actually touched my fish, the one that got away, and estimated it at forty inches. Losing it just about killed me, and I will tie better knots in future.

That was the only bad part. The good parts were a beautiful evening, a sunset over Barnstable Harbor, hit after hit as fish went for our live-lined mackerel, and, at the end of the evening, a massive striped bass top-feeding frenzy that attracted all boats from miles around (and had everyone emptying their tackle boxes trying to figure out what they’d bite on).

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about. I’m here to tell you that I have come up with a brilliant fishing innovation. An innovation that saves resources and money. An innovation that I predict will become standard practice among fisherman, once they read about it here, on Starving off the Land. Perhaps they will even name it after me. The Haspel Method.

The problem it solves is the problem of ice. When you go out fishing, you always have to bring it. Quite a bit of it, usually. You put bags of it in the cooler and head out. If you catch no fish, you don’t open the bags. Sometimes, on those fishless days, you can put the ice back in the freezer when you get home. Sometimes it’s too melted to be recoverable.

If you do catch a fish, you open the bags. Sometimes, you end up using twenty pounds of ice to ice down the 14-inch schoolie bluefish that proved to be your only catch of the day. It’s only the multi-fish trips that feel like they aren’t a grand waste of ice.

Last year, we tried to keep ice on hand at all times, but there were inevitably days when we forgot to replenish our supply and had to pay top dollar for ten pounds at the only store that’s open at five in the morning. I didn’t keep track of how much we spent on ice over the course of the season, but I’m guessing it was into three figures.

Stripers on ice

Not this year, though.

This year, I bought about forty of those little eight-ounce bottles of water, and we keep them in the basement freezer. We dump them in the cooler when we go out, and just add a little seawater when we catch our first fish. The fish cool down beautifully, and we re-freeze the bottles when we get home.

As a bonus, we always have an emergency supply of fresh water on the boat.

Okay, I realize I’m probably not the first fisherman to do this. I didn’t Google it because I didn’t want to know just how many people have done it before. I don’t need to be told that it’s already named after someone else – the Schneiderman Method, or the MacGregor Technique. And if you’ve been doing it for years, you can just smile smugly as you refrain from lording it over me in the comments.

For my part, I plan to live out my life believing I have made a significant contribution to the sport of fishing.

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Striped bass is the kind of fish you never think you can have too much of, until the day you actually have too much of it.

That day is today. Arguably, it was yesterday. And, since Kevin and his brother Marty are out fishing right now, it could most definitely be tomorrow.

In the past two weeks, Kevin and I have caught five keeper stripers, averaging about 13 pounds each. That means we’ve netted about 30 pounds of striped bass filet. (Retail value, $500!)

As a result, I have a Glut Complex, a symptom of seasonal eating.

When you eat what you harvest, you cycle between having none, and having much too much. Most of the year, in the striped bass department, we have none, since the bass pass through here only briefly on their way north, and then again later in the year, equally briefly, on their way south. So, briefly, twice a year, we have much too much. Unless we can’t manage to catch any, in which case we still have none, except what Bob gives us because he always catches them and feels sorry for us.

When you have much too much, your mindset changes. Instead of thinking about what a miracle it is that you can go out in a boat and come home with a delicious fish that you caught yourself, you start thinking about how on earth you’re going to manage to eat the huge bowl of striped bass filets in your refrigerator.

Freezer-ready

I’ve made a dent in the bowl by reversing our long-standing policy of not freezing striped bass. Fish that’s been put down in a home freezer (as opposed to a flash freezer) suffers irreparable harm, and until now, when we had fresh striper, we gave it away. This year, though, I decided I could spend the long winter months finding ways to use less-than-perfect fish. We still give some away, and the shelf of frozen filets is expanding, but we nevertheless have a huge bowl of striped bass filets in the refrigerator.

Luckily, when it comes to food, overabundance is the mother of invention. The only way to manage a Glut Complex is to cook your way through it. If life hands you lemons, first you make lemonade. Then you make lemon curd. Then bars, then custard, then soufflé, and then chicken tagine with olives and preserved lemons. Then limoncello.

We always grill our first striped bass, and move on from there. I made a creamy pasta one night, and a spicy tomato-based stew another night. And then, last night, the stars must have been aligned, because the striped bass poached with leeks and bacon and a garlic-chive cream sauce was awfully good. Kevin went so far as to say it was one of the best things I’ve ever made, but he’s notoriously easy to please.

Still, I’d like to think my glut management skills are improving. Although I have to admit that striped bass isn’t the real test. For that, we’ll have to wait for the kale

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I now know the key to maximizing your chances of finding and catching a fish. And not just any fish – the right fish. The one that’ll make a great photo, and then be dinner for several meals. I’ve discovered the Holy Grail of fishing.

It’s Bob.

Kevin and Bob

Those of you who follow this space may have noticed a pattern. When I write about catching fish, Bob often features in the story. When I write about not catching fish, there’s seldom a mention of Bob. It is emphatically not a coincidence.

There’s been great fishing all week on the north side, in Barnstable Harbor and the channel that leads out to Cape Cod Bay. It is a very specific kind of fishing, and it only happens in the spring, when the mackerel are running.

First, you go out a mile or two into the bay and get yourself some mackerel. You do this with a jig, a string of little hooks with flies on them that mimics a group of the tiny fish that mackerel eat. Once you snag yourself a couple dozen mackerel, you put them in a live well, and go back to the mouth of the harbor. You put one of the mackerel on a hook, toss it out there, and let it swim with the tide. The stripers – the big ones, the ones that can swallow a foot-long bait fish whole – find the mackerel irresistible, and if the time and tide are right, you’ll get hit in the first few minutes.

That’s what everyone says.

On Friday, we went out with our friend Dave to check our first five lobster pots, which Kevin and Dave had put out earlier in the week, and to drop the second five. Our plan was to do the pots, go back home to close up the poultry and grab something to eat, and then to go try for stripers on the south side.

When we pulled into the dock, though, we ran into Bob, who was going out fishing with somebody else. He told us, in a nice way, that we were nuts to do anything but go jig for mackerel and then liveline for stripers. When Kevin told him he’d left the mackerel jig in the other cooler, and we didn’t have one on the boat, Bob just dug into his Bottomless Tackle Box and came up with one for us to borrow. (He actually came up with two, one of which I managed to lose before we even got out to the mackerel. Don’t ask.)

We motored back out, with Bob and his friend right behind us. We went to where our lobster pots were, because we’d seen lots of fish on the fish finder. Bob was a little west of us. We dropped the mackerel rig in, and started jigging. Despite the fact that we were, apparently, surrounded by fish, we got nary a nibble.

Kevin figured we were doing something wrong. “What’s Bob doing?” he asked Dave, as he continued to jig.

Dave picked up the binoculars and peered over at the other boat, maybe a quarter-mile away. “He’s drinking a beer,” Dave said.

Kevin rolled his eyes. When a beer drinker spends as much time on boats as Bob does, there’s bound to be beer/boat overlap. “But what else is he doing?”

“He’s smoking a cigarette.”

Great. “But how’s he jigging?”

Dave reported that Bob seemed to be doing exactly what we were doing, letting the jig sink and then pulling it up through the water over and over again. The only difference was that Bob was getting mackerel and we weren’t.

In our defense, I will point out that we had time constraints, and if we stayed out jigging for mackerel too long, we wouldn’t have a chance at the stripers. Of course, if we didn’t stay out jigging for mackerel, we still wouldn’t have a chance at the stripers, because when they’re eating mackerel you can only catch them with mackerel.

What’s Bob doing?

We went home empty-handed. Bob, we found out later, went home with his limit of striped bass.

But a little thing like limiting out on striped bass doesn’t stop Bob from going out the next day, and the next day he went out with us.

Saturday was a good fishing day. It was relatively warm, and the wind was calm. And it was a weekend, so the parking lot at the ramp was fuller than we’d seen it since last summer. There was a line of people putting boats in, so we had to wait a while, but we were still a couple of hours ahead of the end of the ebb, when the stripers start feeding aggressively. Plenty of time for mackerel.

We rigged an aerator in the cooler and set out to the mackerel grounds. We had plenty of company; there were probably eight or ten boats right around the big can that marks the start of the channel into the harbor.

Bob told us what we ought to be looking for on the fish finder – a big blob of bait, probably nearer the bottom than the top. When we found an area that looked promising, we dropped the jigs in. “Let it go all the way to the bottom, and then reel it part way up,” Bob said.

We jigged. We jigged and jigged and jigged, and we didn’t get any fish.

“They’re either here or they’re not.” Bob shrugged. And kept jigging.

And then we got one, and we were off to the races. At first, it was one here, one there, and then we hit some big schools of them. All three of us would get hit at once, and we’d bring up multiples on each jig. I got four fish on one cast.

We figured that two dozen fish would be more than enough, so when we had at least that many we headed back toward the mouth of the harbor to see if we couldn’t get us a striper.

We had brought pretty much all the fishing tackle we had, but we didn’t have hooks that were big enough to go through a mackerel’s jaw and still have enough exposed to hook a striped bass that eats the mackerel. Luckily, Bob’s Bottomless Tackle Box had a goodly supply.

Bob took a look at my rod, and asked if I’d mind if he changed my leader. Would I mind? Yeah, right.

I had about two feet of monofilament as a leader (which you attach to your fishing line in the hopes that fish won’t notice that there is a string attached to the bait it’s about to take). Bob replaced my monofilament with a fluorocarbon leader from the Bottomless Tackle Box.

Fluorocarbon line looks a lot like monofilament line to a human – they’re both transparent. To a fish, though, there is apparently a difference. Fluorocarbon is supposed to be invisible under water, and lots of fishermen swear by it. It’s expensive, and I’m guessing there wouldn’t be much of a market for it if it didn’t work.

After Bob switched out my leader, he showed me how to hook a mackerel so lots of hook would still be showing, and the mackerel would be firmly tethered. We all three of us hooked on a fish, and in we went.

Our first hit didn’t come immediately, but I don’t think we waited more than about fifteen minutes. Of course, it was Bob’s. I saw him go on the alert, and then I heard the buzz of the drag as he set the hook. He started reeling in his fish – it looked like it was giving him a decent fight – and then all of a sudden the line went slack. He lost it.

Now, if Bob loses a fish, it is safe to conclude that it was inevitable that the fish would be lost. And that set the tone. All three of us would hook fish, and lose them in the first minute or two.

“I’ve never lost so many fish in my life,” Bob said, and that made me feel a lot better about losing mine.

Losing a fish is a crushing disappointment. You feel the hit, and your adrenaline starts to flow. You set the hook, and you know there’s a fish on the other end of your line. And then, all of sudden, there isn’t. After the third or fourth fish, I was stomping the deck in frustration.

But, just around dusk, things started to change. Bob hooked a fish, and it stayed hooked. He fought it for several minutes (which is an eternity when you’re reeling in a fish), and then brought it on board. It was thirty inches, easily a keeper.

We went back to the spot he’d hooked it, and started drifting with the increasingly rapid outgoing tide. By this time, most of our mackerel were dead or dying (they don’t flourish in an aerated cooler), but it didn’t seem to matter. The moving water gave them motion, and Bob got another fish. This time, 36 inches. At least 15 pounds. A big fish.

Me and my fish

Back again, and I finally got a hit with staying power. A fish took my mackerel, and seemed to decide to swim to Portugal. It kept going and going, but I had learned my lesson about trying to reel in when the fish was taking line, and I just let it go.

When I had the chance, I pulled it in, and tried to take as much line back up as I could. Kevin maneuvered the boat to go toward the fish, and I made a little more headway. But every time I thought I was getting it close, it would zoom out again.

Finally, I brought it up close to the boat, and we saw it flash. It was a big fish. A nice fish. Almost certainly a keeper.

I think it took me ten minutes to land that fish, but land it I did. Kevin and Bob both helped talk me through it. My fish was a twin to Bob’s, 36 inches. Fifteen pounds. Almost eight pounds of prime striped bass filet.

The only problem with the trip was that Kevin didn’t get a fish. It may have been the monofilament leader, or it may just have been the luck of the draw, but we’ll be going out to buy a spool of fluorocarbon line in case it’s the former.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Kevin is very, very good at catching fish. He grew up on Long Island, and water is in his blood. He’s taught me about equipment, and fish, and bait, and we’ve spent many hours fishing together.

But all fishing is local, and there’s no substitute for knowing this water, and these fish. Bob’s been fishing here all his life, and that’s the only way to know where the mackerel congregate, or which channel marker the bass swim by.

So it’s lucky for you that Bob isn’t the only secret to fishing, because he’s too busy fishing with us to go fishing with you. But somebody local, somebody who loves to fish, somebody who wants you to fish, too, that’s the secret to fishing.

Thanks, Bob.

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“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m on the bus,” I said. No matter where I am, this is what I always say when he calls my cell and asks me where I am. It’s an answer from a New Yorker cartoon that ran years ago and somehow got traction in our marriage.

“I’m on Route 28, twenty minutes from home,” I added.

“The stripers are in. They’re knocking ‘em dead in Barnstable Harbor. The boat’s ready to go, and Bob’s waiting for us at Millway.”

I wanted one of those little flashing lights with the siren. The kind where you open your window and just stick it on the roof. But they don’t give them to fishermen, so I just did my best to not push the speed limit envelope too much.

I squealed into the driveway. “I’ve got your jacket and bibs in the truck,” Kevin said. I grabbed my boots and a hat, and we were off.

Fifteen minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot at the Millway ramp, and Bob jumped out of his truck, gear in hand. The plan was to go out into the bay and jig for mackerel, and then come back to the mouth of the harbor and liveline the mackerel to get the really big stripers.

As we put the boat in, I looked out at the water with some apprehension. The wind wasn’t that bad, but it was out of the north, and the harbor was choppy. A north wind opposes the outgoing tide, and can make for some serious water once you leave the shelter of the harbor and round the corner into Cape Cod Bay.

“It’s a north wind and an outgoing tide,” I said to Kevin and Bob. “Do you think it’ll be okay out there?”

They thought it would be. And, if it turned out not to be, we could always turn around.

As we were loading the gear, two guys in 23-foot Novi pulled in. Bob knows just about everyone on Cape Cod, and the two guys were no exception. They waved to him as they pulled up to the dock.

“Going for mackerel?” they asked. Bob nodded.

“It’s rough out there. Nine foot swells. We got out to can 4 and had to turn around.”

Now, a 23-foot Novi is a much bigger boat than a 19-foot Eastern. It’s broader and it’s drier. A 23-foot Novi can go places a 19-foot Eastern can only dream about. If they couldn’t get out there, we certainly weren’t going to.

“The boat was completely out of the water,” Bob’s friend said. “When I saw the sky, I decided it was time to turn around.”

Damn! We were so ready to go! We had the mackerel jigs rigged, we had the aerator set up, we had a plan.

So we made another plan.

Bob has vastly more striper fishing experience than Kevin and I do, but I want to assure you that this isn’t the reason we’re friends. We just like Bob. Almost as much as we like Bob’s wife, Mad Dog. That they know where all the fish hang out is just a bonus.

Bob thought we should do some trolling in the channel on the south side of the harbor. When the tide’s on the ebb, the big fish tend to hang out there, catching the little fish as they go out with the tide.

Because this was Plan B, implemented only because we couldn’t just go home when conditions rendered Plan A impracticable, I didn’t have a high level of confidence. But we were there, and the boat was already in the water, so there was no point in not trying.

We went out the Millway inlet into the harbor, and started trolling. As we went west, against the tide, we got nothing. But after we turned around and started east – the direction the fish were probably going – I got a hit in the first few minutes.

It was a big hit. The fish took my pink Sluggo and ran with it. The line just went out and out and out. I tightened the drag, and tried to keep the pressure on.

I don’t have much experience with fish, and most of what I do have is with relatively small fish. A fish of any size at all feels like a rhinoceros. Moby Dick. The Loch Ness monster.

Bob made sure I didn’t screw it up. “Face the fish,” he told me. “Don’t try to reel when it’s taking line, and keep your tip up.”

The first keeper stiper of 2011

It’s difficult to convey how excited I was. That kind of excitement always seems silly in retrospect, once the wild thing at the end of your line has been safely turned into filets and is sitting in the refrigerator, waiting for the grill to heat up. But when there is a wild thing – a wild thing you can eat – at the end of your line, and you are doing your damndest to bring it into the boat, it is ridiculously, disproportionately, inexplicably exciting.

Bob kept me on an even keel. “You’ve got all the time in the world,” he said. “Don’t force it.” He coached me through it, and I landed the fish.

It was 30 inches and 10 pounds. A comfortable margin over the 28-inch minimum, although still small by striper standards. But it was the biggest fish I’ve ever caught. So far.

Bob also landed a keeper by the time thunder put an end to our trip, and all three of us hooked a schoolie or two that we released. Because Bob and Mad Dog aren’t big fish eaters, Bob sent his fish home with us. There are now almost nine pounds of hours-old striped bass filets in our refrigerator. The grill is heating up.

All the things I didn’t get done today will have to get done tomorrow. And they will, somehow. It took me 47 years to figure out that, when there are striped bass to be caught, I want to be out trying to catch them.

God I love to fish.

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Last week, Kevin took the big boat out of winter storage and prepped the motor for the new season. When he was done, he took it down to Prince Cove to put in for a trial run. I didn’t even realize he’d left until the phone rang and I saw his cell number on the caller ID.

“I’m at Prince Cove,” he said, “and the MirroCraft Boys are here.”

The MirroCraft Boys aren’t boys at all. They’re full-grown men, and we see them all the time in their aluminum skiff, out fishing for stripers in Prince Cove. They catch a lot of fish. If the MirroCraft Boys are out, the stripers are in.

“Meet me at the dock,” Kevin said.

I pulled on a couple of extra layers and was out the door inside two minutes.

When I got to the dock, Kevin had the rods rigged and the boat running. We were just about to pull out when a familiar truck pulled into the parking lot. It was our friend Bob, with his Carolina Skiff in tow. He had the same idea we did.

“Leave the boat,” I told him. “Come with us.”

Prince Cove is a long, narrow, winding inlet about a mile long. One offshoot of it leads to the Marstons Mills River, a herring run. The cove and the river are popular fish hangouts, particularly in the spring.

Bob, me, and the first fish of 2011

We were only a couple hundred yards from the dock when we started trolling. Bob swears by a fly at the very beginning of the season, and he had a fly rod with a green hairy thing at the end. I had a white rubber lure, and Kevin had the ever-popular pink Sluggo.

Bob got a hit in the first thirty seconds, and reeled in the very first fish of the season. In the hour and a half we were out, we pulled in six or seven fish among us. Everyone caught something.

Unfortunately, they were all small. The biggest was 19 inches, and would have needed another nine to be a keeper. But that was okay. The fish are here, and the season has begun. As Bob put it, “the skunk is off.”

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Kevin and Bob, willing fish to be in the vicinity

No matter how you slice it, the main point of fishing is to catch fish. It’s all well and good to be out on a boat, with family and friends, on a beautiful day, engaging in a wholesome activity, communing with nature, and all that. But the god’s honest truth is that, without fish, fishing can suck.

It doesn’t invariably suck. All those other nice touchy-feely things offer a kind of tepid consolation, and if it really is a beautiful day, and you really are out with family and friends, coming home with an empty cooler isn’t as bad as when it’s cold and rainy and there’s a jerk on the boat.

Today was a beautiful day. I was out with family (Kevin) and friend (Bob, whose wife Mad Dog unfortunately couldn’t join us). We went tubing.

If, like me, you lack fishing experience, you think ‘tubing’ is when you hang on to an inner tube attached by a rope to the boat, and go really fast. If, unlike me, you know something about fishing, I don’t need to tell you that ‘tubing’ is when you use a long rubber – yes – tube on the end of your line to simulate an eel. You then troll very slowly in an effort to catch striped bass.

I found out about tubing in a rather mortifying incident at our local bait and tackle store, Sports Port. We went in to buy some bait or tackle, I forget which, and The Kid was behind the counter. Those of you who follow this space may remember The Kid as being the guy who wouldn’t tell us his super-secret northside striper spot even after we’d told him our super-secret southside striper spot just the day before.

So, this time, we didn’t even bother asking The Kid where the stripers might be biting and instead, in an effort to be cagy, told him we’d been trying for them in the channel outside Barnstable Harbor, but hadn’t had any luck.

He nodded sympathetically (he’s actually a nice Kid, and we like him). “Were you tubing?” he asked.

I looked at him quizzically because this seemed like one hell of a non sequitur. “No,” I said, with something of the tone you’d employ to explain something simple to a child. “Our boat doesn’t go fast enough.”

What you go tubing with

So, when Bob, a vastly experienced striper fisherman, met us at the Blish Point ramp this morning, and told us he thought it would be a good day to try tubing, I nodded knowledgeably. “Good idea, Bob.”

I was relieved not just to avoid making an ass of myself, but also to find out that we wouldn’t be jigging, which requires you to yank on the fishing pole over and over for hours on end.

We went out through Barnstable Harbor to the north side of Sandy Neck, and put in our tubes. We trolled very slowly, watching for the telltale bending of a pole that meant we had a striper on the line. Over the course of the next seven – count ‘em, seven – hours, it happened exactly once, and we lost the fish immediately.

But the day was not without incident. We hooked three bluefish, and landed two of them. A bluefish bite has a completely different look and feel from a striper bite, so we were under no illusion that we were reeling in what we’d come out for, but catching a bluefish is way better than catching nothing at all.

At one point, headed toward home, it became clear that there was something on one of the lines. It was also clear that it wasn’t a fish – might be seaweed, might be a crab. Bob reeled it in, and discovered that the lure, which had been bouncing off the bottom, had snagged some rogue gear someone had lost. We disentangled our line from the rogue line and started bringing up the gear we’d caught.

It was a wire line, and there was a lot of it. Bob just kept hauling. When he had a huge, snarled ball of stainless steel wire, and was still pulling, he told us he thought there was something on the end of it.

Bob's prize catch: the bunker spoon

He pulled some more, and we saw it coming up from the deep, a white lure with a very convincing fish-like motion. “It’s a bunker spoon!” He said. “I’ve got a friend who loves these things, but they’re thirty dollars a pop.”

A bunker spoon, as it turns out, is a foot-long piece of metal (this one was painted white) with a curve in it and a hook you could hang your coat on. It’s supposed to look like a really big menhaden (which are called bunker or pogies in these parts), a prime bait fish, and attract the really big stripers that eat really big menhaden.

If you can’t catch a fish, the next best thing is to catch a lure that will help you catch a fish the next time.

But the excitement wasn’t over. As we were trolling east toward the tip of Sandy Neck, Bob spotted a black fin sticking out of the water. Now, anyone who’s seen Jaws knows what to do when you see a fin sticking out of the water, but we opted against panicking.

It wasn’t a shark. It was an ocean sunfish, a giant (it can reach 3000 pounds), peaceable, warmth-loving fish. Its scientific name is Mola mola, but it’s called a sunfish because it likes to loll on the water’s surface, catching rays. Confusingly, in every other language, it’s called something that translates roughly to moonfish because those non-English speakers choose to focus on the fish’s shape, which is round and full, rather than on its habits.

Whatever you call it, we’d seen them once or twice before in these waters. This time, though, I happened to have a camera.

We all wanted to get a better look, and I wanted to get a picture, so Bob pulled the boat up close to the sunfish.

And now – here, today – I’m going on record as officially believing in the Loch Ness Monster. I was skeptical of the idea of a giant brontosaurus living in a Scottish lake, but it wasn’t mere skepticism that made me a bona fide non-believer. Up until today, I found the lack of photographic evidence to be the absolutely convincing factor.

But I’m here to tell you, you can’t photograph a sea monster. I don’t care if you’re Jacques Cousteau. If something big swims up next to your boat, you are not getting a picture of it. The boat’s moving, the monster’s moving, the auto-focus is looking at the water’s surface, the glare on the screen is rendering your image invisible.

A 1000-pound ocean sunfish. Photo by Jacques Cousteau.

Because my photographic evidence isn’t exactly convincing, I don’t expect you to believe me, but we saw not one, not two, but three ocean sunfish. It was apparently a nice afternoon for sunbathing. We also saw the splash of something very, very large (“It looked like someone dropped a Volkswagen in the water,” Bob said), but we did not see the large thing itself.

So, there was no striper, but there was more than tepid consolation. We had bluefish, we had an expensive lure dragged up from the depths, we had a posse of sea monsters. We had a beautiful day, and no jerks.

It didn’t suck at all.

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As good as it gets

We were all using different lures with different actions, and I had a large, bright green Storm shad runner. We started far inside the cove and gradually drifted out, each of us casting in a different direction. I was the first to get a hit. At first, I thought it was a fish. Then I thought it was the mooring buoy (it’s an easy mistake). Then I thought it was a fish again.

It was a fish, and I watched it detach itself from the lure and swim away just as I pulled it up to the boat. That’s a terrible sight.

We went back to the inside of the cove and drifted again. I got a couple more hits, but didn’t hook anything. Nobody else got any action at all. And then I got one on the line.

When you’re fighting a fish, it’s hard to tell how big it is. Even the little ones can be surprisingly strong, and it always feels to me like I’ve got a whale on the line. I reeled like my life depended on it, and the fish pulled like his did. Since his actually did, I guess I can understand.

This one, I managed to get all the way to the boat, and Bob reached over and brought him onboard. Then came the moment of truth. The legal minimum for a striped bass is 28 inches, and this one looked like it was right on the cusp.

Our cooler has inches marked off on the top, but it only goes up to 24. Luckily, the gizmo that opens the gas tank is exactly four inches. Kevin held the gizmo next to the cooler, and I laid the fish on the cooler lid.

It was tight, and Bob had to point the tail to get the last quarter-inch, but it just made it. “It’s a keepah!” he declared.

It was only then that I realized my heart was beating fast and the adrenaline was flowing. Catching a fish is absurdly exciting. “Is it just that our excitement threshold goes way down as we get older?” I asked Suzie.

“Nah,” she said. “This is as good as it gets!” Suzie loves to fish, and I think she was as excited for me as I was for myself. It was my first striper, it was a keeper, and Suzie and I were both grinning ear-to-ear.

I hadn’t brought the camera, but Suzie whipped out her cell phone and took a picture of me and my fish. It’s a testament to how happy I was to catch a striper that I’m willing to post, for all the world to see, a picture of me looking like a total dork. As long as I’m a total dork holding a keeper, I’m OK with that.

There’s a lot of uncertainty in our lives right now. Kevin and I both have careers that have been affected by the economy, and we’ve both taken financial and professional hits. There are no regular paychecks in our lives, and we don’t know what’s coming around the bend. We chose this kind of life, and we wouldn’t trade it, but it has not been without its stresses.

As we motored out through Prince Cove, headed for the North Bay fishing spot, on a calm, cool, May day, Suzie and I talked about how lucky we were to live here, to have the kinds of lives that give us the freedom to go fishing in the afternoon. “It’s as good as it gets,” she said. And that was before we caught the fish.

I took my striper home, and Kevin helped me scale it down by the pond. I spread newspapers out on our kitchen table, and got out our sharpest filet knife. I did a respectable, although not an expert job at removing the filets, and we froze the rack to use as lobster bait.

Kevin took down the scale, and put the filets on it. Three pounds of striper, enough to share with friends. He put it in a bag in the coldest part of the fridge.

“Honey,” he said to me, “Who’s got it better than us?”

Nobody. Nobody’s got it better than us.

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Every year, at about this time, the waters around Cape Cod fill with striped bass just arrived from down south, where they had the good sense to spend the winter. The striper’s combination of being tricky to catch and excellent to eat make it a favorite of local anglers, and every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a rod and reel goes out to try and catch one.

Well, call me Harry, because last week I went out to Cotuit Bay to see if there weren’t a striper with a my name on it.

Kevin at the Cotuit cut

The south end of Cotuit Bay is blocked by a glorified sand bar called Sampson’s Island, and there’s a cut on the west end where only about 300 feet separates the island from the mainland. Any fish that wants in or out of the bay has to go through the cut (or take a circuitous route through other bays to a cut on the east side), so it’s a prime fishing spot.

It’s where Kevin and I were one evening last week, casting from the mainland out into the channel.  After we’d been there about twenty minutes, a minivan pulled into the little parking lot adjacent to the beach. More fishermen, we figured.

Sure enough, seven – count ‘em, seven – big Russian guys piled out. It was like one of those clown cars; they just kept coming. And then they took their boat out of the back.

Got that? The boat was in the car. It wasn’t on top of the car, or being towed by the car. The boat was in the car.

I pound this point home because I want you to know just how small this boat was. I think it was the smallest boat I’ve ever seen, a washtub with a bow and a stern. As we watched, one of the Russian guys carried it, singlehandedly, down to the beach. Another guy got the trolling motor, and a third brought a battery. They set it all up, clearly intending to take it across the cut to Sampson’s Island.

I look at the guys, I look at their stuff, and I look at the boat, which looks like it shouldn’t carry more than about 300 pounds, and it turns into one of those word problems you get in math class. In hell. There are seven Russians, each of whom weighs no less than 225 pounds. There is one boat, with a maximum capacity of 300 pounds. How many trips does it take to get all the Russians to Sampson’s Island?

The answer, it turns out, is three, because Russians – or at least these Russians – reject all conventional notions of maximum capacity. The guy driving the boat would take two Russians and a pile of gear and set off across the narrows at a brisk half-knot. The boat was so overloaded that the water came within inches of the gunwales. Kevin and I watched, bracing for the moment a wave would come over the side and swamp them.

The wave never came. This was fortunate, as they had no flotation devices. I suppose they could have brought them, but then they wouldn’t have had room for their charcoal grill, a tackle box the size of the Parthenon, or the two cases of Coors Light.

When they were all safely onto the island, they set up their grill and their lawn chairs, popped open beers and started casting. It was prime time, and they had the island to themselves.

It turned out that there wasn’t a striper with my name on it that night, but I bet my bottom dollar there was one out there that said “Boris” in big letters.

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