After a lifetime fishing the Elizabeths, there are many stories to tell.
Some more understanding individuals might believe I had a valid reason to feel sorry for myself. It was September 1, my birthday, and because my wife had family visiting, I made plans to fish an overnight at Cuttyhunk with a friend. My friend, under the threat of spousal retribution, chose the wise way out and stayed home to host a family cookout. I was alone that evening drifting along Quicksand Point, the state line between Massachusetts and Rhode Island for an hour where one lone bluefish had severed the sensuously undulating body of my prime bass eel right up to the head.
Cuttyhunk Calling
I looked longingly at the Gay Head Light, bright and clear on this calm evening and decided I was going to Cuttyhunk after all. With a full tank of fuel and a spare five gallon Jerry jug secured up forward, with now just 17 lively bass eels in my floating car and a cooler of soda, water and snacks I decided to make the run to the island. Under those conditions I could easily cruise at 18 knots, putting me on the north side of the Bosworth Hole on Cuttyhunks, Sow and Pigs Reef. The south side of the reef was out of bounds for me unless I dared Captain Charlie Haag, with his hefty double planked Ballentine, to ram me or have Bob Smith force me into the stones. These high priests of Cuttyhunk striperdom owned the south side from Sow and Pigs to Robinsons Hole and guarded it with the intimidation of their fierce dictatorship. The guide’s dock, its slips, lockers and the rusty old balance scale was the seat of their throne. Never to be defiled by the uninvited.
I knew my place, I set the grapnel off a stern cleat and began casting up tide of the weakening rip of the incoming tide where I hooked up after losing two fish to reluctant strikes. Just before slack, Captain Lloyd Bosworth in his handsome black Winslow bass boat, turned into the hole and began to make his last pass before heading for Devils Bridge or Quicks Hole to work another piece of moving water. I had a teen-sized bass flopping on the deck as Bosworth moved in then made his signature turn directly towards the Gay Head Light. That was when the angler on the port side came tight to a fish, and I watched the skipper snap the tiller and power the boat out of the rip and into deeper water.
At that point in my early Cuttyhunk experience Captain Lloyd was the only local to advance me a friendly nod. The tide went slack sending most boats heading across the sound to catch the last of the rip at Gay Head or Devils Bridge. Only then was it safe for me to leave my hide and head to Southwest Bluff and the shallow slot between two rockpiles where the bones of a boat that drifted in too close were still visible. My eel tempted two fish in the 20-pound class out of there before another boat began to approach from the east. It was Coco.
An Old Friend
I never knew Coco’s full name and I don’t know anyone who did. He worked as a lumper in the New Bedford commercial fishery, unloading big draggers when they docked and allowing the crews who had been at sea to head for the taverns, or go home to their families. He loved striper fishing and if he wasn’t unloading boats he was somewhere between Pasque and Cuttyhunk tossing eels into the rocky shoreline. His teenage son caught a 60-pounder using an old Penn spinning reel with less than a 100 yards of line; we measured when I replaced it. He was extremely grateful for my endowment and always had something for me whenever we met.
He came over to say hello and see how I was doing then was headed into the harbor for some sleep, informing me he was heading for New Bedford at first light and that he had a load of ice and would be willing to take my catch to market. Striper fishing was primarily a cash market at that time and the price of whole fresh fish ranged from a quarter to 35 cents a pound. He gave me a pastry from his favorite Portuguese bakery then headed towards Canapitsit Channel and the interior of Cuttyhunk Harbor.
The aforementioned Gay Head light was our fog indicator. When it was bright and steady we continued fishing but if that light became hazy or began to disappear it triggered a mad sprint for the red channel marker outside Canapitsit channel into Cuttyhunk or if you didn’t make it, a long, damp night outside anchored in the fog. None of the skippers I knew had radar, although most could afford a unit, they were so big that the only place to mount them was on the foredeck which interfered with visibility.
On my tiller steered boats, I often stood on an elevated platform in the stern so I could see right over the bow and spot any rocks, washes or lobster pots before they became a problem. I believe it’s a stretch to call Canapitsit a channel, with its twists and turns it’s more like a sluiceway with a few buoys that are usually dancing when the tide is ripping. On very foggy nights when I was unable to make it into the channel, I picked my way around the western point of Nashawena right along the rocky shoreline that usually held stripers of respectable sizes during moving water.
That night, even though I would have been able to negotiate the channel, I opted to anchor up along the aforementioned rocky point and cast my eels into those productive rocks. That same location had resulted in a 1,385-pound catch of husky stripers with three 50’s and six 40’s for my buddy Russ and his two man crew. The fish were moving and hungry that night and I picked away for nine more bass from 20 to 34 pounds, not counting two more huskies that my single handed gaffing scraped a few scales from before the hook pulled.
Finding Coco
When the bite tapered off, I had a total of 11 fish, and I wanted to get them to Coco before he left for New Bedford. It was nearly 4 a.m. when I hooked up to a mooring pole close to him and sat upright in my foul weather jacket and forced myself to remain awake. Just after five I felt a hand shaking my right shoulder and Coco saying, “are you alive or dead?” I was exhausted. He chopped a half cake of ice into his big canvas, and we offloaded my fish into it. He was heading for the dock at Clarks Cove to sell our combined catches. I didn’t know him that well, but I trusted him.
With six live eels in my pot and four more dead ones on ice (never throw an eel away) I headed for Barge Cove, the first cove after the Cuttyhunk clubhouse corner where boulders supported a bass stand, and a location that had provided some great fishing for me in the past. One night in the early 1970s Ed Kirker, fishing with Eddie Chicca caught a 71-pound striper less than 75 yards from where I was anchored. The sun was up when I made my first drift in that cove landing an 18-pound bass. There were not many schoolies along the north shore of Vineyard Sound that season. That was the only fish the cove produced that morning, and I was having second thoughts about not returning to the rocky point at Nashawena where my catch had come from.
A PLace of Giants
One night many years ago, I received a call (long before cell phones and cameras) from a well-known plug builder who was at Cuttyhunk for the weekend and had not caught a fish along that island’s shore the night before. I told him about the aforementioned rocky point of Nashawena but cautioned him not to try and swim it (he was one of the early wetsuit crowd), when the tide was running. He thanked me and went on to swim across the channel anyway. His reward was a huge 48 or 50-pounder which he sent me a photo of when he returned. That was when he told me he had to hail down a boat the next morning that rope dragged him and his fish across those strong currents back to the Cuttyhunk spit. I will provide exact details on that encounter in a personal meeting with any reader.
Southwest Bluff, the first land mass on Cuttyhunk at the end of the Pigs was always a great spot to toss a plug or eel as the waters of Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound converged and on calm nights there is usually a spot on the northwest corner of Gosnold Pond where fish hold in the current waiting for baitfish or your preferred offerings. Check that occasional freshet whenever it is running. When I was on the north side of the island and the fog rolled in too quickly, I ran northeast around that side of the island and tucked in the slot between Cuttyhunk and Pennikese Island where plug casting was always very rewarding as long as you avoided Whale Rock, Pease Ledge, and a boulder sometimes called the Old Man occasionally awash, which if you were familiar with them usually produced a bass or two and if not, they were treacherous prop eaters.
Best Advice
Readers often ask where the Three Rock Pool is located. The area I refer to as the Three Rock Pool is just east of the Cuttyhunk Club, however the X’s marking the rocks on the charts are not exactly as you might see them. During the next few years captains Bob Smith, Frank Sabatowski, Don Lynch and Charlie Tilton along with his brother AP my became friends. Captain Roland Coulombe of the Jig-M-Up (one of my boyhood mentors) was always my ally and tutor who I could count on for ice, fish storage and food if I was desperate, which I almost always was.
After the first day of fall my fish money had been in a niche in Coco’s wallet for almost a month, and it was not until mid-December of that same year that after numerous attempts to meet we finally hooked up at the Green Diner near Clarks Cove where he bought me an amazing lunch. He then pulled a worn yellow slip wrapped around a fold of bills from his wallet, just in time to enhance the prospects of the upcoming holiday season. If that slip and money could only talk!
I have hundreds of stories, perhaps a thousand, about my experiences in and around those islands and the people I met. Back then striper fishing was so competitive that few if any of the charter skippers spoke with each other, at least none that I knew. And if you were a sibling of an island family and your mother did not give birth at home with a midwife and instead went to a New Bedford hospital, you were never considered a native islander. One thing I can say about my Cuttyhunk experiences is that I was a very lucky boy to have lived it and a very fortunate man to have survived and benefited from all of them. Many of the photos in my Cuttyhunk folder bring back fond memories of times we will never see or experience again. I thank God for the guardian angel he assigned to watch over me.
