I’m fresh off a morning of chasing striper schools aboard my friend, and elite angler, Matt Perry’s boat. He’s one of those guys that gets ‘the wild in his eyes’ as soon as you start talking about fishing. And one of the things I love about people like that is, no matter how old they are, you can see beneath the beard, and in his case the wild mullet, and the layers that age lays upon us and see straight through to when they were a wide-eyed kid hooking their first topwater striper.
Matt is the living example of why it is so important to continue to pursue what you love, purely for the enjoyment of it. The excitement that stacks up in our heads and shuffles in with all of that thought and reasoning that leads us to a plan to execute, simply to chase down and catch a fish; this is the kind of ‘stuff’ that keeps us young, teaches us to release our stresses and proves the value of doing something for the simple enjoyment of the experience.
I rolled into the lot at the ramp first, the sky still dark, the world still snoring, it’s always my goal to get there before the captain, just so there’s no possible way that I will hold us up. Matt zipped in shortly after and, before I knew it, we were puttering through the no wake zone, to the wide expanse of Buzzards Bay. As the sun climbed through the clouds, I could see the Railroad Bridge in the Canal, I could see the light at Cleveland Ledge… looking south I could see the dark shores of Naushon Island and I could barely make out the horizon dip that was Woods Hole.
We began scanning through a large expanse of nondescript water, Matt’s eyes trained on the sidescan, I surveyed the scene looking for birds and bass. Matt looked up and spotted the birds before I could find them He was excited because the fish seemed to be in the same place they were the day before. As we idled into the scene, there were birds diving all around us, bass popping in every direction, and two more groupings of birds a quarter mile south. “It’s almost like albie season with all these birds!” Matt said with a laugh. I don’t know if the fleet was kind of ‘onto’ Matt or if it’s just the way guys fish in that area, but it seemed that no matter how we moved, other boats would throttle down and try to beat us to where they predicted we were headed.
Fed up, Matt motored three miles away and we poked around another pile of fish that ended up not being in a playful mood. We snuck back into the first area and stuck a few nicer fish, one of them going into the mid-30-pound class, before the parade came back to town and boats were literally cutting off our drift! Aggravated, Matt pinned the throttle and we took a long ride to a fast-moving rip, bass could be seen pushing bait out of the rip, intermittently, and we set up to fish the rip with just one other boat that – inexplicably – left as soon as we arrived. I hooked a fish right away and then things slowed down. Matt continued to jockey the boat around, making different drifts. Then a solo boat came into the area and – understandably – Matt, sort of, prepared himself to be aggravated again.
But then, something happened. The new boat stopped at the bottom of the rip and observed how we were fishing the area. “Oh boy, what is this guy gonna do?” Matt seemed to inquire into the tide. But after getting a feel for our drift, the new boat slowly ran around the sweet spot and set up at the top of the rip to make a similar drift, with 500 feet between us. Matt shook his head apologetically, “Why is it, that having someone do the right thing is so rare that you don’t even believe what you’re seeing when they do it?” Matt wondered rhetorically. He offered a friendly wave to the boat and joked, “I should give that guy a business card that’s good for a pack of free baits!” – he was referencing the soft plastics he makes under the name Bigwater Baits.
It’s sad that etiquette has been mostly cast aside by the average waterman, greed and glory now supersede the unwritten rules of doing the right thing. Those boats that were cutting us off would have had a better chance to hook more fish if they would have just drifted naturally into the feeding fish, but the result was short-lived bites that were repeatedly put down by throttle-happy line cutters… all you can do is shrug your shoulders and always be looking ahead to the location of that next great bite. And that’s something that Matt is very good at.
