Dave tells me that thanks to conservation efforts, this sea has been getting cleaner for years, and that it now attracts marine turtles and ospreys. All around us, cormorants, which tend to shun cloudy water, are standing sentry on posts and pilings. Out in the mazy wetlands, we can see feeder rills that sidewind their way toward the inlet, and in these feeders, Jimmy says, you can spy tiny grass shrimp, which fluke like to feed on. But soon the marshes are swallowed up behind us in a blaze of light, and the Atlantic Beach Bridge floats overhead, a brief shadow. Around its piers, we glimpse the silhouettes of men, bent and intense, baiting their lines for stripers.
Heading southwest toward Rockaway Reef—an artificial structure composed of metal junk deposited to attract underwater life—we hit a sudsier sea. Toward the offing, we make out long, lavender-tinted profiles standing on the horizon, vast enough to seem permanent fixtures but actually just container ships awaiting permission to enter New York–New Jersey Harbor. Suddenly, a big red clam boat materializes, rigged with cranes jutting out on either side like an old-fashioned nun’s wimple. She’s chugging and listing heavily to one side, and as we slip around behind her we see the huge, comblike dredge, half weighing her over, being hoisted amidships. Striped bass often cruise in the shadow of such a tub, feeding on the dislodged clams spinning down through the water and on the loose bivalves kicking along the ocean floor—the jaws of a striper can easily crush a clamshell. As stripers like the clam boat, fishermen like the stripers, and numerous small craft are excitedly whipping around the vessel, their motors hacking and grinding. The men call back and forth, companionably trading tips. We drop our lines to the sea bottom, then wind them up five reel-turns. Jimmy is cutting bait—squid and whitebait, and live bunker from a brine-filled basin—and tossing the chunks astern.
And so hours pass in the crystalline light: The sea laps at our hull, seagulls gurgle and wheeze, and the wind twists the sound of the clam boat into a fitful snore. We’re rolling with a spiral motion, the water black and glassy as obsidian, the breeze blowing it into furrowed swells that mesmerize and lull me into a strange, vigilant doze. Though I haven’t been fishing in years, I’ve remembered not to bring a watch, not to fret, not to guess at the time ... yet after a long, dreamlike spell, I realize with a start, as the clam boat grinds backward for the umpteenth time and hauls its dripping rake out of the water, that the sun, which used to be needling my left cheekbone, is now scorching my forehead and is also much higher in the sky. It’s early afternoon, we’ve been tossing around out here since eight this morning, and we still haven’t caught a thing.
Sure, Dave thinks he can beat the Devil. But today we’re having a nasty little run of bad luck, and everyone on board has a different way of dealing with it. Dave repeatedly drops and reels in his bait. Jimmy chunks more bunker and flings it loose over the stern. Artie gives the ocean a profane piece of his mind. Pete, scrutinizing his computerized sonar screen, steers us quietly from point to point.
Jimmy: Fishing—you gotta love it.
Dave: It ain’t over till it’s over.
But soon the tide has turned, it’s ebbing now, and the water is pocked with trails of white bubbles; by five o’clock, we’ve casually pulled in several sea bass and three stripers. Drifting into shallower water to catch fluke, we dangle our bait just off the bottom, and soon a big one flashes in the air, its rich umber color badged with white whirligig patterns. Yet the sky, no longer blue, is cloudy and opalescent, the horizon a gray smear. Golden evening highlights dance on a steeper sea, the gulls shriek and snatch at our bait, and spray slaps over our gunwales. “One more drift?” says Artie, but the others feel that we’ve done what we can, and we yank our lines.
Just as we put on some speed, however, and are plowing out of the bight, Pete flaps a hand toward something up ahead. It’s dusk now, but we can just make out what he’s pointing at: Moving along the hilly sea is a strange patch that’s all dark, blackened as though by rain. “The bluefish are running,” shouts Dave. “Grab the net!” Drawing nearer, we see that the water is actually bristling, tweaked upward into a zillion arrowy points by tiny fish—bunker struggling to escape into the air. As a net flies overboard, I catch sight of fragments of small fish passing in a mountainous, glassy swell, like sardines in aspic—they’re the butt ends of bunker sheared apart by bluefish. The bluefish,more than a yard long, dart for 10 or 15 feet along the surface of the water, gnashing at their prey and leaving white tails of foam like shooting stars, their teeth cutting a clean, semicircular arc right through the bunker. Dave and his friends are moving with the speed and precision of infielders nailing down a triple play. We make several runs upwind of the black water, then drift down into it, each time netting lots of writhing bluefish, which are immediately packed in ice. But it’s almost dark now, we can hardly see what we’re doing, and we all know that this piece of luck should have come along hours earlier. With two ice chests packed full of fish, we turn back, calling it a day.
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