Eye On The East: Companions in the Water

October-November 2006

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
To download a pdf copy of the magazine click here: > DOWNLOAD

by Adam Bolonsky

A storm offshore to the southeast is plowing mounds of swell towards Cape Ann; two days of waves breaking against Straitsmouth and Thachers Islands has littered their shores with clumps of brown, hairy weed and dried green-and-rust-colored sheets. Much of the weed has been ground up by the waves into tiny pieces, a kind of green, water-borne dust which clouds the water. The northern and eastern corners of Thachers, and the reef at Londoner, are overrun and awash in it. Waves are climbing laboriously over the exposed shoals and shallow ledges before sliding backwards.

It is October, nearly the end of fall, and the sunlight is muted in comparison to its intensity two months ago. At 60°F, the air is nearly as cool as the water. The abrupt water-temperature shifts of summer, when the offshore current can fill Cape Ann’s waters with bracing cold columns one day, warm the next, are done. Each day is a minute or two shorter than the one before. Stability persists only in the water temperature; it’s not likely to change much for another couple of weeks. The pines and maples and oaks onshore look tired and worn, showing the effects of a summer-long drought.

I had checked the cell-phone for word from a fellow kayaking angler who’d made vague noises about meeting me here for a kayak-fishing trip. He hadn’t left a message, so I lashed on the tackle and rods, lifted the kayak and labored down the cobble to the water. I loaded my gear and placed a bottle of water and a bag of carrots and grapes in the dayhatch. It was a short paddle to Milk Island, maybe half a mile.

Little more than a low-lying pile of rocks offshore buttressed by boulders and rippling with seagulls, Milk Island is a disappointment to land on but always interesting to paddle past. It has no walking paths, no beach. It smells. The preacher gulls on it are aggressive, territorial. They swoop at you, try to bat you in the head. The island has scant vegetation, no soft plants, just a smudgy green growth which chokes the pond in its center. At times the island’s wild odor of fecal ammonia is powerful enough to make your eyes sting if you stand on the wrong end of the island in the wind. Yet its shoreline waters teem with fish, especially on a submerged bar off its northwest corner, which extends from the island like the lazily curled tail of a cat, and in the waters of its western end, where a long gravel bar twists towards the mainland.

The bar is made of rocks and small boulders, its waters scraped by the tidal currents which run over it, startlingly clear. Peering down, you can survey the island’s spinal structure, and conjecture that the bar and island are the source of the stones which build Pebble Beach’s steep walls. Unlike nearby Straitsmouth and Thachers Islands, or places like Whale Cove and Lands End, whose waters are thick with shaggy carpets of bottom growth, neither seaweed nor kelp darken the rocks of Milk’s bar. These are the only clear waters for several miles in all points of the compass, and a fine area to look for schools of bass nosing around below. Here, an open-eyed kayaker can glimpse the mystifying, attention-halting view of the underwater world. Next summer, this will be a good place to anchor and, with a wetsuit and mask, go over the side and snorkel.

A catch of Bonito.

I last paddled here a week ago and saw the enticements of the clarity of the water. My buddy Paul and I had paddled among a busily-feeding school of what appeared to be two or three-year-old striped bass, each schoolie about twenty inches long. Packed tightly on the surface, the fish wandered about in the form of a large, supple raft. They fed on hatched larvae that floated on the surface, making a sipping, lapping sound, like dogs drinking from a pond. The school swam in close formation, each fish’s green head dipping and rising like the head of a tiny horse. With each dip of the head, the fish seemed to swallow. But the school could be startled into diving by the subtlest of movements. At the off-rhythm splash of one of our paddles dipped too gracelessly into the water, the entire school twisted below the surface—a massive splash. A few minutes later the school resurfaced, each fish again placidly licking the water.

Late-fall massings of striped bass near the surface, when the fish are feeding on free-floating eggs or larvae, make the fish bob on the water rather than slap and thrash and twist, like they do when feeding on small fish. The schools drift slowly, unlike their frenzied chasings earlier in the season. Their disturbances do not disappear and reappear on one acre of water, now another. They do not spread, strengthen, grow to a tumult, then disappear. Rather, their surfacing is as static as that of a drifting net or bed of kelp, a kind of clot on the surface.

An angler who encounters this behavior for the first time soon becomes frustrated. He will rifle his tackle box in search of the one lure to which the school will react, raining down a variety: metal spoons, poppers, swimmers, plugs, jigs, jigheads, rubber worms, shads. It never works—it’s like trying to speak to a deaf man on the other side of a closed door. Any tactic short of dipping a net into the water is doomed to failure, and using a net to catch striped bass is illegal. The fish feed unperturbed, undistracted, entranced by a school-wide fixation.

I paddled to the southeastern corner of Milk in search of the school I had seen previously, knowing that striped bass encamp in particular areas in the fall. Within a few minutes, I could see the not-so-subtle markings on the water that indicate a school just below the surface. You first see a distinct dark patch on the water, like that of a puff of wind brushing the surface, which colors the water by roughening up and breaking down its otherwise reflective surface. This is a denser, darker stippling, more concentrated, more subtle than that of wind.

I approached the school, realizing it would be useless to try to fish. I could see individual fish eyes staring across the surface as the school floated forward with that peculiar hobby-horsing, head-nodding motion. Their delicate, wedge-shaped heads emerged from the water; next, their dark olive-green backs, their spiny dorsal fins flattened back. Then their heads dipped.

Suddenly, the entire school detected the pressure of my kayak’s hull within the tensile surface of the water. There is a vibration or a hum transmitted through the water to the lateral line of each fish. The signal was wrong, out of proportion, too loud or broad, and the nerve alerted each and every fish, sending them all darting towards the bottom. The dark print on the water faded, the water cleared, and now these waters were mine alone; but I knew that in just a few minutes, the school would rise to greet me again.