10 Best Marine Carpet For Fishing Boat

Best Marine Carpet For Fishing Boat in 2023

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Gloucester, Massachusetts - How Hook-and-Line Fishermen Fish for Striped Bass

After spending a season fishing from a commercial striped bass boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, here are some of the keeper tricks the writer learned.

Market price was $1.80 a pound yesterday, but in typical waterfront fashion, the auction kept twenty cents of that, dropping our net. Our buyer, by buying from us direct, will pay slightly less than market but won't take any withhold, increasing our net.

Our stripers - by law all 34" and over, most in the mid-40's --- are scattered throughout the boat according to a system with no more order to it than what has made the fish fit. Several hundred pounds of bluefish and stripers lie in the aft hold. A tote forward holds a several hundred pounds more, and two industrial-sized coolers midships hold another several pounds of stripers in shaved ice and salt.

The floorboards are awash in deckers, or the stripers commercial fishermen store on deck on tuna blankets because there's no other place to put them. Deckers are of two sorts: quota deckers, when the boat has no other space left to store fish, and hurry-up deckers, or fish that get kicked around on deck because stripers have come over the rail so fast there hasn't been time to do anything with them other than unhook, drop them, rebait, and get the hooks back into the water.

Hurry-up deckers bring pandemonium to the boat. They add an element of mayhem. They create chaos. The fish bang around. Quota-trip deckers are less chaotic: strictly business. They are fish that complete a trip. You stow them as methodically as putting away dishes.

We haul anchor. It's 4:30 a.m. We've fished since 7:00 the night before. The half ton of stripers we've taken weigh, on average, twenty-five pounds per. We are three-quarters of a mile southeast of Eastern Point, Gloucester, pretty much the latitude and longitude numbers we fished the night before.

I am not giving away any secrets by revealing our location and the hours we fished. All night around us bobbed nearly thirty other commercial boats, including two hastily-converted wooden cabin cruisers some hard-luck cases trailered up from waters south for the same reason we motored here: to fish on hearsay waters that have ably proven their worth. We anchored, chummed, baited our hooks with whole herring, then tied on four-ounce bank sinkers and threw the mess overboard.

We used set-ups that might surprise the recreational angler: 150-pound test wire leader on swivels just as thick. Using these lengths of chain mail to fish renders any discussion of stripers being leader-shy ridiculous: the leader is thick enough to wire a new bumper onto a bus.

The horizon begins to pinken. After we were hit by hurry-up deckers around midnight, we tapped into a second school an hour later. A few later we siphoned a couple from another school. At 4:00 a.m., the 40-inch hurry-up and quota deckers hammered us so hard taking them felt like drinking water from an fire hydrant with a Dixie cup.

The captain fished the entire night barefoot. Holding a thick boat rod in one hand, a supple spincasting rod in the other, he stood splayfooted with the butt of either each rod jammed against a hip. Usually he had a 40" striper on one rod, on the other, or both. He kept shouting at his girlfriend to take one of his rods and guide its fish around the stern before the fish tangled together. He gaffed each fish with a loud "thock!"

Many times I found myself either landing a 43-inch striper or wielding a fillet knife, leader taut against the mouth of a sandshark. Also known as spiny dogfish, sandshark are toothless wonders, three-foot long, brown-hued creatures with the body of a hammerhead and the silly face of a grinning dog. Two spines extend from their caudal and dorsal fins, angleed back like the thorns of a rosebush, only longer. The shape of grotesquely-sharpened carpenter's nail-set, the spines leave deep and immediate puncture wounds in your hands or arms or legs if you're distracted.

Removing a hook from a sandshark on a commercial striper trip involves two methods. First you pin the tail and head under foot. Then you decide whether to twist the hook from the fish's head or to hack off the fish's head, remove the hook, and throw the heady and body overboard.

Most commercial anglers have none of the live removal method. They hack off the head, dump the body overboard, then twist the hook from the fish's mouth with a pair of pliers. I eventually gathered brutality enough to use the uglier method, and can't say I regret it.

The captain and his girlfriend land two more stripers. With a crash, they gaff the fish on deck. These are the last of our quota-trip deckers, and bring us to forty fish. These won't get kicked aside on the floorboards. They get placed on ice forward.

Trip over. Time to stow the gear.

We return to the dock, my immediate pay for this trip a 45-inch striper so large the only place I can rinse and ice it at home is the bathtub, for which, needless to say, I will catch hell from my girlfriend.

The machine-like efficiency of a commercial striper trip has a lot to teach the recreational angler. One lesson is to fish at night if you can. A second is to chum, then chum again. The last, perhaps most important, is to consider whether striper fishing really is a fancy art requiring tricky gear. Catching big ones really is a simple matter: fish deep; fish at night; fish with whole herring on a single hook. Other than that and a depthsounder, it's a matter of crude gear.