“S hark tore off half the body with one bite, swam down, then came right back and grabbed the head just as I was reaching for it. You could hear its teeth slap together.” Tony Biski shook his head, bloodshot eyes squinting from beneath a weathered baseball cap against the late-summer wind and sun. His boat planed over unseason-ably calm seas, always scanning for signs of fish. “Damn thing musta been 15 feet long.” His shark tale was spurred by passing one of the many yellow buoys around Monomoy Island, just off Chatham, MA, which scan the surrounding Atlantic seeking radio transmissions from tags embedded in the more than 100 great white sharks known to cruise the area. Sharks have been a hot-button issue for the re-gion as more and more great whites arrive every year to feast on a huge, protected and rapidly multiplying seal population. The toothy interlopers continually cause beach closures and experts predict it’s only a matter of time before a fatal attack on a human occurs. It’s a hard thing to ignore as we skirt sandy shores lined with mountains of honking seal sausages, many bearing the telltale marks of a close getaway. Tony points a weathered finger off the bow, cigarette-hoarse voice rasping, “There!” Sharks are forgotten as tails and fins whip the water to boiling. Silver scales catch the sun as false albacore tear into a disco bait ball of bunker under a swarm of squawking gulls. Hilary Hutcheson is already standing, casting into the fray, and soon her rod bends and reel whines as a false albacore’s greasy muscle mass launches away from the boat. Perched at the stern, JT Van Zandt shouts as he, too, hooks into a fish. Tony stands at the ready between them, a hint of a grin etched into his round, sunburned face. When I say, “I’m from Cape Cod” to anyone who lives outside a three-hour drive of the place, their eyes glaze wistfully with daydreams of JFK’s Camelot. A sea breeze rustles their hair, sand fills their shoes, embroidered whales breach on pastel pants. Patti Page’s “You’re sure to fall in love…with old Cape Cod” rides an aromatic wave of coconut suntan lotion while Rockwellian children play in the surf. My whole life is reduced to a preconceived notion, a postcard from their brain’s nostalgia center with hazy hues, high tax brack-ets and never-ending tumblers of vodka on the rocks. Who isn’t fond of sand dunes and salty air? This fantastical fever dream is, of course, a fabrica-tion. Cape Cod isn’t an idealized, sandy version of the American dream. Looking for a place where the sun is always shining, and rich and beautifully tan people in vintage SUVs choke down lobster rolls while waving to passing sailboats? I know the spot. It’s a hundred miles south, at the tip of Long Island. It’s called the Hamptons. Cape Cod, on the other hand, is Mad Magazine’ s sardonic take on that Hamptons life. We too have loads of vacationers every summer, but our traffic jam of doughy, angst-ridden invaders is a far cry from the tabloid-fodder celebutantes and plastic surgery disasters cavorting on Montauk’s beaches. You’ll spot the occasional pastel-pushing stereotype, but they’re usually not the fashionable scions of wealthy families. They’re real estate agents, or someone who just got hustled by a real estate agent and hasn’t weathered enough off-seasons to see their preppy dream decay into ritualistic liver flogging in shabby, nautically themed bars with ironic names. Like anywhere with a long seafaring history and large population of fishing folks, the Cape has had its fair share of illicit activities and sordid deeds. We were taught as kids that Blackbeard himself was attracted to our waters, drawn by a bounty of easy fishing and the beauty of a local lady, an alleged witch named Hannah Screecham. So taken was he that it’s whispered he chose to bury a chunk of his famed treasure near her house on Dead Neck Island off the mid-Cape village of Osterville. Ironically, the former site of Screecham’s home is now a massive estate belonging to some mod-ern-day pirates, the Koch brothers, so if gold wasn’t there before, it sure is now. 072 CAPE COD
The Flyfish Journal Volume Eight, Issue Four: Page 72
