Cape Casting

by

John T. Lockwood

Bayside, oceanside, fishing the saltwater of outer Cape Cod from either shore is an activity governed by the tides. Much more so, however, on the Bayside. From Brewster to Wellfleet the bay retreats at low tide to hundreds of yards to a mile or more from its high-water mark. The shore fisherman must wait until the tide is nearly in before he can so much as cast a line for bluefish or stripers. This often means night fishing, as the tides do not bother to conform themselves to man's convenience. As a boy, I liked to head down to the bay beach after dark when the tides were right to spend a good part of a summer's evening watching the fishermen work the water with rods impaled in holders stuck in the sand. Black-booted and wind-breakered against the dank breeze coming in off the bay, they lit illegal fires, brewed coffee or drank from paper bags they passed one to the other, as they waited upon the arrival of a school of bluefish chasing fry into the shallows. Sometimes, the Air Force would provide entertainment.

The Air Force? A few hundred yards offshore in Cape Cod Bay there is an old World War II Liberty Ship permanently grounded on a sand bar. It is the James C. Longstreet, named after a Confederate general of the old Army of Northern Virginia who had, after the war, committed the twin sacrileges of criticizing Robert E. Lee's strategy at Gettysburg (worse - he was right) and going to work as an ambassador for President Ulysses S. Grant. Longstreet was banished from the Southern pantheon for these sins. In an ironic twist, the ship bearing his name was condemned by the War Department to spend all its remaining days in Cape Cod Bay - a most Yankee body of water. The Longstreet was used by the Air Force and the Navy for target practice. At night from shore at Eastham, I spent many evenings watching the Navy fighter-bombers strafe the old vessel with tracer fire and flash it with spotlights. The fisherfolk watched from between their perched rods with one eye on the fire-and-light show paid for with their tax dollars and the other on their fishing poles, looking for the tell-tale dance set off by a hooked fish.

Saltwater fishing was not much to my liking. I had been raised on inland lake and stream fishing and had no equipment suitable to the vasty deep. The one time I had tried fishing on a choppy night next to the blackboots, I had used a stout but still freshwater bait casting rod and fifteen pound test line equipped with a treble hook on which I impaled squid for bait, all weighted with a three-ounce pyramid sinker which I somehow had in my possession. Cape Cod Bay simply wrecked this rig.

The sinker was too much weight for the rod to properly handle and I spent many casts in trying to put out enough line to get my bait competitive. Once dunked, the end tackle was swept ashore by the tide and choppiness as the rod was not stiff enough to hold it steady. Eventually, after half an hour or so, the line snapped off on casting and I gave up. A good thing, all that, as the worst thing that could have happened would have been for even a small Blue or Striper to have taken my bait. The freshwater rig could handle up to about ten pounds of freshwater bass or pike, but saltwater fish of the same weight are much stronger, in my experience. They would have snapped the rod or zipped all the line off the puny reel and left me defeated and ruined.

I rarely saw any fish caught by these night fishermen (in summer, day fishing from this nearby beach was not allowed as it posed a hazard to bathers), but some mornings I would discover evidence of their activity. Dead dogfish -- a kind of shark -- would sometimes be left as moldering litter on the beaches. The nightmen discarded sharks cruelly when they were caught as the dogfish were no good for eating and the fishermen fancied that the sharks either devoured the more desirable species or they at least competed with them for fodder. Further arousing the disdain of the fishers, the Bluefish and Striped Bass refused to put in an appearance when the dogfish were present.

My only really successful saltwater fishing trip at Cape Cod occurred in the summer of my sixteenth year. An expedition of six, which included my father and I, the rest being acquaintances of my father, set forth on a bright summer's day for Pleasant Bay in Chatham. There we rented boats and went fishing in the bay. Oddly, I was assigned to a boat not with my father but with two of his friends: Dave Smith and a Mr. Enterline. We used squid for bait, thank God. Or rather, thank Dave Smith who had insisted on squid at the bait and tackle shop in Orleans. The commonest forms of live bait foisted on the unsuspecting public in New England are sand worms and blood worms. Both are horrible to work with, almost beyond description. The sandworm, which is sometimes called a clamworm, is gray-tan ugly with a sort of sick, green sheen to it. The jaws - yes, it has them -- are black. It would be the ugliest thing in the world were it not for the bloodworm. The bloodworm has tentacles at the head and prickly feet on either side of each pinkish segment. The bloodworm not only has jaws, but teeth, and bites. I cannot make my peace with a worm that has tentacles, feet and bites with two nasty teeth that inflict more pain and swelling than a good bee sting. Oh yes, I should mention that both the sandworm and the bloodworm can grow up to three feet in length.

That particular excursion to Pleasant Bay I caught numerous flounder which are superb eating, if a bit sluggish on the hook. We also took some Tautog or Blackfish and some weird Sea Robins. Sea Robins croak when removed from the water. This is somewhat creepy and this fish, with its elongated fins and angular, boxy head, looks like it comes from some other planet. We threw the Robins back. I also caught a large skate, which is a kind of rayfinned shark. The skate was a slow but strong swimmer and fought hard for its life. I released it back to its salty home.

I remember another trip to Pleasant Bay when my father dropped my older brother Al and I off for the day and we rented a boat and headed out to catch flounder. The boat guy talked Al into buying the damn bloodworms for bait, over my objections. Things started out badly when Al tied on a saltwater plug that he had made himself and cast it. It flew a mile at least, and I complimented him on his casting. "I got news for you," said Al, "it came loose." He must have mistied the knot and it slipped off on casting and the lure was lost forever. I got bit by a bloodworm right away. Thereafter, we found it difficult to fish as we were afraid of our bait. I smoked at the time -- eighteen year-old idiot that I was -- and lost one fish when I accidentally touched my line with the end of my cigarette. Monofilament line -- even heavy saltwater stuff -- burns through almost instantly and the fish got a free reprieve. We caught only one flounder for our morning's efforts, I think I caught it. Oddly, at this stage of our lives, Al and I were pretty fair fishermen and capable of doing well on either stream or lake. But we were unbelievably inept in Saltwater.

I never rented a charter boat to do serious fishing offshore in Cape Cod Bay or in the ocean proper at that time. But a few years after the Pleasant Bay fiasco with my brother, when Al was in the Navy and stationed in Bermuda, I visited him and we went out on a Navy launch for some fishing at the banks off the island.

The skipper of the naval cabin cruiser, a seaman named Beamer, slowed the boat to a stop in an area far enough off shore that Bermuda had disappeared over the horizon. It looked, to me, no different than the rest of the Atlantic that surrounded us in an endless waterscape of deep sapphire blue stretching to where the sea met the sky. The weather was hot and bright. It was cloudless, except for a thin line of distant white cirrus which hugged the horizon. I found myself imagining what it would be like to be stranded in an open lifeboat through a series of such days.

People fear being lost in the wilderness, by which they mean the great woods, the blazing desert or perhaps the arctic. We don't generally use the term wilderness in reference to the sea. Yet the Ocean is the largest expanse of wild on the planet and it incorporates the terrors of the other wild areas in itself: like the forest it is haunted by large, man-eating predators and one experiences the disorientation brought on by the utter lack of landmarks; it can resemble the desert in being a blazing hot expanse affording no shade and -- irony! -- no water; or it can be as frigid and unfeeling as the arctic as it freezes one in its bleak monotony. The Ocean is the wild place that resides closest to most of us. The greater part of the population of my native land, the USA, lives on the coastlands, west and east. Go down to the sea and look out at it. You are standing at the edge of civilization and staring forth into the wilderness. Row a boat out of sight of land and you are all at sea -- lost in a country to which evolution has not suited you. Step out of the boat and the hostile, unsupportive, uncaring ocean will kill you and feed you to the fishes.

Beamer had stopped the boat over a bank that rose from great depths to a relatively shallow 200 to 250 feet of water. We started a "chum line", ladling out into the water a mixture of sand and fish guts ground together into a most unappetizing mulch. Unappetizing to me, that is, to the fish this glop resembled manna from heaven. We hoped for exciting game fish to move up into the chum line which drifted slowly down beneath the blue sparkles, visibly spreading its scent to the depths. As luck -- or the lack of it -- would have it, a fair sized barracuda moved into the line and lay there, suspended in the gray-pink cloud amid the deep blue. The presence of this predator -- long, round-eyed and dagger-toothed -- kept all other fish out of the line. We tried to entice the 'cuda into striking at a bait fish we rigged on one rod but he seemed strangely indifferent, preferring to drift with the cloud and do nothing.

The stubborn barracuda forced us to drop our baits down deep to get to fish feeding on the bank. Allowing one's bait to drop to such depths is sheer tedium. I swung my heavily-sinkered line over the side of the boat and watched it sink out of sight. The line rotated the spool of the reel as it sank. I had to pay attention to this all the way as considerable momentum built up as the line descended. Once it reached the bottom, the line would stop but the spool would continue to spin causing line to pay out into a god-awful mess of a tangle. As soon as I sensed that the line had stopped, I had to thumb the spool to prevent this. The process of dropping the line took five or more minutes. Thereafter, one waited until a deep bend occurred in the rod signaling a fish had taken the bait, and it was haul-away time, laboriously cranking in the line. It took a lot more time and work coming up than going down and you could not be sure if you actually had a fish until you could see it in the clear water far below.

We caught Rock Hind and Red Snappers, a few Jack Crevally and assorted oddities. My largest catch was a Skipjack Tuna of about 20 lbs that fought long and very hard. All the other fish I caught came up like sacks of sand. A curiosity of fishing at such depths is that several species, particularly the Red Snappers and Hinds could not decompress quickly enough to compensate for the rapid change of depth while being brought up. They became helpless as their air bladders expanded with the released pressure and would revolve tail foremost and ascend by themselves to the surface. A few got off the hook about halfway up but could be seen as distorted red (both species were of that color) objects rotating steadily as they involuntarily headed for daylight. We netted them when they burst through the surface like corks.

All the while the sun blazed away, reflecting in diamond-dazzle off the sapphire water. I was dressed Arabian-like from head to toe, wearing a pith-helmet and dark glasses. Even so, my nose got good and sunburned, blistering and scaling in the ensuing days.

I have not returned to saltwater fishing in quite some time now. In the brief intervals of my busy life in which I find myself at Cape Cod with a fishing rod in my hand, it is a freshwater rod. I fish the coastal ponds for bass and pickerel. But one day I will have more time and will invest in a big, heavy spinning rod and sturdy fishline, bank sinkers and 6/0 hooks. I 'll head down the same road as I did as a boy. I'll cast my line out towards what little is left of the James C. Longstreet and stick the rod in a holder and wait. I'll wait for the Blues to chase fry into the shallows, standing patiently in the dank breeze coming in off the Atlantic wilderness in my windbreaker and black boots.