December 1, 2017 – Two Guys Walk into the Surf – Ocean County, New Jersey

It looked fishy, as did Joe.

Two anglers walked out onto the strand this morning, just as the gray light of predawn was blurring the clarity of white stars and black sky, a north to south sweep of current and a moderate swell dictating just how far they might venture into the frothy white water.  The air was cold but temperate for the first day of December, the wind out of the west before it chose to turn NNW at maybe 15 knots, a hint of bunker in the active air, the organic, oily smell of live menhaden that drives bass and gannets to feed, albeit miles from the shore, as is so often the case in this era of beach replenishment and re-replenishment of replenished beaches, a struggle mankind should and will surely lose someday.  

In days of yore we called this a good-eating slot fish: 26 and change.

The publicly-funded dunes kept the two men, now revealed by the imminent sunrise to be father and son, comfortable and the wind made their casts heroic, assisting them in reaching the edge of the sandbar even at near-flood tide.  As the sun continued to rise and the tide to fall, exposing some more targets to, well, target with their diving plugs and bucktails, both led by feather teasers for more finicky quarry or, as is often the case this time of the season, eager but by no means suicidal smaller prey making only their first or perhaps second coastal migrations.

The fishier of the two with fish...

So, two anglers walked out onto the beach, following a long, pre-dawn drive, and made wind-assisted casts into the surf, and both of them, first the son and then the father, felt the half-expected, always-uncanny strike of a striped bass; and yet only one of them—the, as some say, “fishier” of the two, the one who will likely log one-hundred fishing trips this year—landed his fish, one that measured short of legal, but not by much.  Yes, unfortunately, it was the son who landed his sub-legal bass, while the father lost his in the wash near shore.  The son would have preferred the inverse to be true (honestly) but he did enjoy the morning with his still capable and moderately “fishy” father.