Fishing Obsession reborn

One late spring while working at Falmouth High School, the school nurse and band parent told me her husband was an avid fisherman. I jokingly said that I am looking forward to going on a trip with him and only a couple weeks later it was set up. I was very excited and knew that we would be in search of some striped bass. Embarrassing enough, I must admit that this 27 year old (at the time) life-long Cape Codder had never caught a striped bass let alone a keeper. I had been fishing only a few times with my father when I actually saw people get stripers. Of course every time that I thought that I was about to land my first it always ended up being Mr. Bluefish. In the 80's when I did most of my previous saltwater fishing stripers were scarce, but menhaden and large bluefish were plentiful. I would say that my father caught at least a half a dozen stripers while we were out fishing together and I came up with the goose egg. There were also times that when we were fishing we saw other fisherman catch stripers as well, I can only think of two and no one had caught a keeper.

Liz Page, the wonderful, now retired school nurse set up a fishing trip in early June with me and her husband Captain Steve Page. Steve looks like the old man of the sea with the big long gray beard and all. He also has the most amazing slip location ever. His boat, the Obidiah, is situated directly behind The Landfall Restaurant in Woods Hole. On this day we headed out of Woods Hole and before we were too far Steve said, "It doesn't look like we will have to go that far today." I am assuming that he was talking to other boats and learned that there were many stripers at Middle Ground. As we approached Middle Ground Steve went underneath and came up with two boat rods rigged with squid skirts. I vaguely remembered these lures from when we used to troll with my fathers old fishing buddy Sonny Troianos, but that was about twenty years before this. We approached Middle Ground and Steve told me to drop it in the water. I was expecting to troll around for a while and honestly did not know what to expect other than that. After about 30 seconds, BAM, big fish. My first striper, my first keeper, a massive 44 inch fish. Steve and I continued to fish for probably another 2 to 3 hours and landed around 30 fish. More than 20 of these fish were over the 32 inch minimum at the time and the smallest were all keepers in todays 28 inch size limit. This in itself was amazing for me to learn because I remember that throughout my entire childhood the size limit was 36 inches. The fish that we caught on this amazing day were the biggest fish and the most amount of fish that Steve had ever seen at Middle Ground. Lucky me, finally. The stripers were all over squid on this day. I remember looking at a school of stripers working to the surface and saw these large dark orange squid literally jumping directly out of the water. The seagulls loved that as many of them swooped down to fly off with a squid of their own. I also remember being able to see the school of stripers rise up from the depths to attack our squid skirts. It was incredible to see these 40 inch fish come up so fast and hit so hard. This was a fishing day that I will never forget.