Smiling in the surf

It was December 28, 2015. After 41 years of chasing the trophy striped bass of a lifetime, success came in one all too fleeting moment.

Northeast winds of 35 to 40 knots propelled a sleet storm that pummeled my face while I stood on the beach looking at a nasty, 7-ft New Jersey surf. I punched an Ava 27 jig with an orange tail and a 5-in. Tsunami sand eel teaser through the 28-degree air and it landed just past the second breaker. When the jig hit the water, I clicked over the bail and it felt like my lure hit a piece of dock or telephone pole that had been sent adrift by the Forester’s pounding. But after a few seconds, it began to move, peeling drag off a 10,000-class reel and 12-ft. rod and heading out into the whitewater.

The fight was long and arduous. I ran down the beach, staying in front of the fish to keep the hook lodged, knowing it was a class of fish I had never hooked into before and might never see again. Finally, the spike dorsal fin breached the surface in one foot of whitewater and I promptly walked backward, pulling the bruiser-striped bass out of the surf and onto the sand. The blood rushing to my head was almost enough to make me pass out—a striped bass worthy of a lifetime of angling was laying in front of me. I bent down and measured the surf striper at 50 inches long with a 30-in. girth. By IGFA calculations, it weighed between 51 and 55 pounds. In the Northeast, this was a striper—by boat or by surf—that barely one percent of people will ever catch in a lifetime of pursuit.

I looked down at the bass and my mind reeled, faced with the greatest fishing conundrum of my career. You see, as a professional angler and writer, I always promote the conservation of fully grown adult fish, as most of the time they are the breeders of the species. In front of me lay a 50-lb. class cow carrying millions of eggs, possibly seeding generations of bass to come. I knew I should release it, but this bass was the biggest I knew I would probably ever catch from the surf. It was literally like winning the lottery, the odds can be that profound. So naturally, high on the moment, I was going to take this bass home with me, contact a skilled taxidermist and pay for the most beautiful skin-mount striper. It would hang on my wall for generations, paying tribute to the beauty of the linesider that took 41 years of dedicated surf fishing to land.

My adrenaline still pumping, I snapped three quick shots of the fish on the sand and quickly put the camera back in my wader pocket. Then I just stopped and stared at the fish before me. It was one of those quintessential moments when time seems to stand still and everything on the planet just comes to a halt. I felt total calm, yet a lifetime of memories flooded my thoughts. I thought of being just six years old in 1980, when striper stocks were nearly extinct, and how my mother signed fake sick notes so I could play hooky from school and travel down to the Jersey Shore with my father and brother to surf fish. We’d catch little bass of 20 to maybe 30 inches to bring home to mom for the dinner table. I thought of years of casting for stripers with family and friends, thousands of days when we took advantage of any available time to forget about the worries of life and just go fishing. I thought of my dad. He would be proud to see that fish mounted on my wall. He would have said I earned it, and it would prove the years of sleepless nights, lost relationships, missed work days and all the lost time otherwise spent with humanity were somehow worth it.

I bent down to unhook the teaser from the mouth of the striper, and in that moment, I realized that I had yet to even crack a smile while catching this bass. It was then that I knew what I must do. I lipped the mouth of the bass with my two bare hands, then shifted one underneath its belly and promptly walked down into the surf, step by step, and lowered the bass into the crashing whitewater. She slipped into the cold saltwater in a frozen moment of silence, and then with a violent shake, slapped her big broom tail in my face, spraying me with water as I loosened my grip. She swam, full of energy, back through the pounding surf. She was free, and I was even more free.

There would be no pictures of her on the scale at tackle shops, or interviews with magazines and TV outlets of the fish of a lifetime, or even a mount to hang on my wall that I could show friends and family over the years. There would be no such glory. As I stood up after her release, soaking wet and waves crashing over me, I realized a smile as far and wide as the sunrise breaking over the Atlantic horizon was plastered across my face. A smile that had been building for a lifetime.