“Be careful out there. I can hear them breaking from here.” Ernie was changing the oil on the inboard marine bass boat I helped him build four years prior. This was the third weekend we were blown out of a planned hunt for dolphin-sized bluefish off the west side of Nomans. The week prior to making those plans Ernie’s deckmate, Ed Joaquim boated a 19-pound, 8-ounce blue on a homemade Linesider popping plug there. My little inboard bass boat was two slips down from Ernie and I was itching to wet a line. His admonition about being careful out there was not disregarded, but the tide was flooding, and the northwest wind would soon tame those rollers that were crashing against the islands.
I brought my eel bucket with six feisty snakes, but began by casting a popper in the lee of East Island where I could get in tight and have the wind blow me out of harms way. I fooled an 8-pound striper which would put a smile on Ernie’s face as our last three dockside meals were white bread lunch meat sandwiches with Devil Dog desserts. He loved to cook, and with his little two burner stove, would come up with a creative fish dish. In the course of surveying my surroundings, I’d noticed a few gulls hovering over a location on the crest of Warrens Point which we’d named the Boiler. I had two more follows but no takes as my plug was picking up weed lifted off the wrack line.
The Boiler did not look as daunting as it did when I first arrived, so I racked the spinner and grabbed an old 8-foot eel stick I had just picked up from Bridge Bait where the loosened reel seat was drilled and pinned. I ran up to the upwind side of the Boiler to check the drift which pushed me off and out of danger. I poked around in the bucket and using a piece of dry burlap grabbed the largest eel just behind the head. It turned and twisted leaving a white scar of slime on my foul weather top while I struggled to insert the gold, offset 9/0 Eagle Claw hook under its chin and out an eye socket.
Eels that size do not twist and turn into a knot, as soon as they hit the water they head for the bottom, seeking a rock to hide under a rock. Looking up I then saw five big herring gulls hovering in the thermals overhead and looking at something in the water I could not see. I turned the boat around and headed back as close as I dared to the notorious hump and lobbed the eel onto its crest. I had to holler and pull as one of the big gulls decided to take a swipe and make a meal of my bass candy. Once safely under the surface I could feel the strong throbs as the eel headed for the bottom. I set the drag on the heavy side and thumbed slight pressure on the Squidder spool filled with red 30-pound test red Handy line. I heard a squawk and looked up to see two more gulls had joined the party.
I then noticed a big scup skidding onto the surface followed by the huge maw and tall dorsal of a big striper. The terrified baitfish was engulfed in one swallow, which caused me to hope there was more than one big striper on the feed. My eel began to vibrate followed by the familiar bump of a striper clamping its jaws on the serpent’s head. Line began burning off the reel at an alarming rate and only an educated thumb prevented an overrun.
After setting up, I had that fish scraping in and around the rocks for more than five minutes and clearly saw it twice. I’ve seen live stripers, several 60s and Cinto’s 73, but this striper was larger than all of them. Each time it was nearly close enough to gaff, the shadow of the boat spooked it back down into the depths. As we had been drifting much closer to the point, I turned the drag knob another notch and put the boots to the fish hoping for just one shot with the gaff. When the fish was finally close enough for a thrust, I had my left hand on the rod and the gaff in my right when she made one last powerful dive which pulled my rod down onto the coaming and snapped it just below the reel seat. I felt a sharp pain in my left palm, dropped the gaff and made a frantic leap to grab the reel with my right hand, pulling it inboard before shifting into forward to avoid being washed up onto the rocky point. Once out in deeper water I wrapped a rag around my left palm and turned the boat toward the harbor. Ernie was heading to the Fo’s’cle for a beer when I pulled in and asked how I did. Hiding my injury and any mention of the dangerous episode I had just survived, I replied, “water’s dirty, nothing doing.”
