It was a frosty first week in November and stripers were on the move. I received a call from Bob the night before describing the action wading the skinny bar just below the old South Jetty. He told me the new inlet jetties were changing the drifting sands, and the bar would probably wash away over the winter. We met on 10th Street and suited up with just a whisper of a breeze, each with a 9- or 10-foot plugging rod and small assortment of plugs and metal lures. Water temps were in the mid-50s so wetsuits would be needed to reach the flattened end of the bar.
There were four of us heading out, the Eggie brothers, Troy and Tom, along with Bob and myself. Being the rookie in the bunch, I followed the others in the hike across a hundred or so yards of beach and dune. It was just breaking first light, 3 hours into the falling tide, as we waded in. After 50 yards in knee-high water, we turned 20 degrees north where a few spots deepened as we slowly moved farther off the beach. I kept looking back at the dimming twinkling lights on shore and started to question my good judgement. Ambling along in silence, my nervousness started to turn to near terror after realizing we were nearly a half mile from the beach, with the bar break still another hundred yards ahead.
Tom was first to reach the end of the bar, with Bob following and Troy just in front of me to the right. Bob motioned for me to line up between him and Troy. My plug bag was floating so I was careful to make sure nothing spilled out. I attached a yellow and white Long-A Bomber and turned to the breaking waves 20 yards in front and my heart nearly stopped! With a quarter of the sun above the horizon I could see the silhouettes of a half-dozen stripers in the cresting 5-foot waves. My mouth was wide open and sure enough I gagged on some foaming saltwater from a passing wave.
With the wind blowing from behind us, my lure sailed over an oncoming wave. As I wound the slack and felt the swimming action, I began cranking slowly and steadily. Just as the next wave approached a striper rose from in front of me and hit the lure, going airborne through the backside of the wave. With my rod bent and line peeling from the spool, I saw Troy was also releasing a short to my right. Bob was hooked up as well, but with the angle of the sun I could not see Tom at the top of the bar.
I lifted the reel to see how much line remained and started to gain some as the fish stayed down. Keeping the line tight as the fish went right, I saw Troy set the hook on another fish, bellowing a joyous scream. As I brought the bass closer, I was startled by its size. These were the days well before the slot fish, and as I glanced back toward the shore, I realized that keeping this fish would mean heading to the beach and leaving the bar, a weird dilemma at the time with a striper of close to 30 pounds.
Unsure how to release my striper I watched Troy getting his fish within reach, tucking the rod under his left armpit, grabbing the leader and pulling the fish’s head above the water. With his left hand holding the fish’s lower jaw open he reached for his pliers and quickly pulled the two hooks. His fish appeared larger than mine and with a sweeping motion he released the bass which swam straight for the edge of the bar. I hastily repeated the release with a sense of sadness at letting go of a trophy striper, but with an eagerness to replicate that moment.
It seemed everyone was hooked continually for quite some time. I had five more, though none as large as the first. The last fish swallowed most of my plug, the bottom treble lodged deep with the front treble an inch through the fish’s lower jaw. Struggling for 10 minutes I had to release the snap on the plug and pushed the front hook through to crimp the barb before I could remove it. As I finally released the fish the others converged toward me. “We need to head in, or we’ll be swimming back,” Tom said.
After drying off and saying goodbye to the Eggie brothers, Bob and I headed to Bill’s Diner for breakfast. We didn’t talk much, at first, until I finally asked Bob if what occurred was some hallucination? Shaking his head no, he replied “you know with the right tide and a serious northeast winter storm that bar is history, we could be the last to make that trek?
No one counted, probably 25 or 30 fish had been released; our trophy was sharing that extraordinary hundred feet of flat sand for a few hours where few anglers dared to venture.
