CUTBANK RIGHT THE APPROPRIATE FEELINGS OF SUPERIORITY If you patrol the upper East Coast’s back bays, canals, saltwater ponds and surf long enough, you’re bound to run into striped bass somewhere on your travels. Photo: Tim Romano Words: Matt Dunn Mike’s wife , Dianna, thinks that getting eaten by a shark would be a good way to die. She says it would be like “falling asleep in a blender.” For what it’s worth, I’d prefer a heroin overdose. Mike lives in New Jersey and his favorite place to fish is at the tip of Sandy Hook, the spit of land that reaches out into Raritan Bay and points straight up the Verrazano Narrows. New York City exists here in the sunlight like jagged silver glinting art deco rubble strewn across the horizon. The Verrazano Bridge spans the narrows like an insect. At night the whole thing is a low electric glow show. It drops to about 40 feet just off the beach and giant container ships push by in the shipping channel for the Port of New York, occasionally close enough to read their plimsolls. The bay and the ocean meet at a right angle and bait gets pushed up against the beach and the stripers come in close. When the tide is changing the ocean rips across the point like a river. It was a long, Sisyphean walk through loose sand to the rip; high tide was in the middle of the night, so we started well into evening on a bellyful of Four Roses, enchiladas verdes and tramadol. We’d made the hike 12 hours earlier and 12 hours before that, too, and we hadn’t seen a fish yet. Mike makes me go to the rip for every high tide when I visit: “I spoke to your doctor, and he’s concerned about your cardiovascular health. This hike is strictly on his orders.” By the third trip I had my sand-hiking program dialed in, which means simply that I had given up on hard ground and made peace with the slog. It’s not warm on Sandy Hook in autumn, but it’s also not cold and it’s oddly humid and it’s salty and there was sand in everything and my waders were gnarly. During the hike I dwelled on how silly it feels to wave a fly rod around at the endless expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. But this is the reason to go to the rip—it narrows things down to a manageable target. 106 THE FLYFISH JOURNAL
The Flyfish Journal The Flyfish Journal 13.4: Page 106
