Close your eyes but imagine them still opened and this is all you can see. A sudden rushing of wings passes near you, then the piercing shriek of a big gull. The cold water holds you tightly, pushing against you as the tidal flow picks up steam. Cast the big fly, as big as you could make it with all this adult bunker around, into the blackness by feel alone, focussing hard on the four-stroke motion, the double haul you’ll need to get any distance at all on this monstrosity, the fly coming dangerously close when your lack of sleep takes hold, and then the fly smacks flush against the side of your head, like a strong hand coming from out of nowhere. Somehow the 4/0 hook catches no skin. Then come the deep gulps close by, and your near ear-ectamy is forgotten. Tilt your head to one side, a Robin hot on the trail of a juicy nightcrawler, trying to locate by sound alone. Measure off arm-lengths of line, feel your fly line shoot out smoothly through the guides. Imagine the fly landing near the swirl. Strip and visualize your fly moving like a wounded menhaden struggling to find safety in the nearby eel grass. Strip-strip pause, strip-strip pause. Then it comes when you know it will if it’s going to—the gulp and splash that says big fish, and even though you’re waiting for it, it still scares the proverbial or maybe even some literal piss out of you, coming not three feet away just as you were about to pick up and try again—all this in the pitch black, remember. Feel the backing burning out through your fingers. Get your hands out of the way fast. Finally, slide the big cow striper onto the sand, turn your light on her, take a measurement or two, something tangible to hold onto this memory wrought in the intangible night. Revive and release, and slip the rod into your armpit as you strip line off the reel and into your stripping apron and move back out to where nothing can be seen but so much is happening.
Night fishing the Atlantic coast for stripers, blues, weakfish strikes to the core of what I love about fly fishing. It deepens and intensifies an already intense experience. Without sight to guide you, the emotional force taken in through that sense is transferred over to the other senses, thereby making the whole emotional engagement exponentially more potent.
Add to this the natural element of fear brought on by darkness, and you’re really in for it. I remember walking along a sandbar in new-moon blackness at low tide, crunching noisily through mussels and shells. I heard voices in the distance, and they must have heard me. Then one of them turned a blinding beam on me, instantly turned it away and apologized. “Sorry, I just wanted to see what was coming,” he said, the slightest tremble in his voice. “Just the boogey man,” I answered and we all laughed, relieved. I think of how my two-year old daughter used to peer into the darkness of our guest room, wide-eyed, clinging to my leg and saying, “no like it, dawk.”
Let a 15 pound bluefish chop adult menhaden in half not a foot from your left thigh in the utter darkness trying not to move at all and knowing especially not to put fingers in the water, and you’ll know that deep primordial fear my daughter was experiencing. Or just try feeling something take firm hold of your submerged foot, then start clawing up your leg, something fairly big, which, after several moments of ineffable terror, your logic tells you is nothing more than a horny horseshoe crab thinking that big brown boot is just the thing to crawl onto.
You have to brace yourself for anything in this nocturnal fishing game—prep your psyche not to kick into fright and flight mode. Any manner of slumbering water fowl might burst forth from the eel grass. Cormorants will surface a few feet away and give you one of their patented monster-like, otherworldly snort-grunts.
But alas, at night, we’re talking the deep dead of night, long after the boats have gone away and light is forgotten, is when the big ones come out and hunt. And it doesn’t just happen at the shoreline of land and ocean. On Michigan’s Upper Peninsula I remember being out in my canoe on a lake past midnight under a near-full June moon, fishing small poppers for smallmouth bass and nothing at all happening, starting to paddle back to my campsite when a switch came on, gulps, explosions coming from all along a shallow, sandy shoreline nearby. I cast more and more expectantly as I drifted closer to the commotion. On the moonlit surface, I could see boils right next to my popper. I’d yank the fly back toward me, ducking out of the way, the fish never having intended to eat my offering. Finally, I noticed the huge insects on the surface, a flotilla of upright mayfly wings, but mayflies like nothing I’d ever seen. It was the storied Hex (hexagenia limbata) hatch. I searched through my wooly buggers and clousers and poppers and found a dragonfly imitation that I trimmed back a little so it became a compradun-like concoction, greased it up, and caught 1-3 pound smallies on nearly every cast for the next half hour—until the switch clicked off as suddenly as it had come on, and the moon moved below the horizon.
Recently I skimmed a deer-hair pattern across lily pads on an Adirondack bass pond in the dead of night and was met with a strike the likes of which I’ve never felt. I wrestled with the largest largemouth I’ve ever hooked, only to lose him at the side of my kayak, the 15 pound tippet snapped clean off.
In the cool dark quiet still of the night, the big predatory fish of all waters emerge.
Go to your favorite trout stream at 2AM and chuck a deer hair mouse into the current, swim it toward you, and hold on. Wade, canoe, kick boat or kayak into the thick of the lily pads on that small local bass pond and listen for the bad boys out looking for baby ducks or rodents or anything that moves. But especially, get to the ocean side and let your other senses click in as you seek out that sweet, almondy odor of gamefish eating baitfish, your ears turning up a notch trying to locate a sound that isn’t waves lapping sand and rocks or wind, so it must be fish.
Fishing in the darkness, is to become a predator in the hour of the predator. Almost all predatory species (on land and in water) hunt at night. Put all the poetic rhetoric about natural beauty aside for the time. Night fishing is the distillation of the predatory nature of the act. There’s no pretty scenery, just the blackness, you, your quarry, your heightened sense of smell, hearing, everything reduced to essences. I like to use a small popper, to break up the silence a little, just to provide some small degree of sensory stimulus.
Sometimes, you’re not even certain you’re there. You think you might be dreaming still, back in bed beside your wife, your children sighing in sleep in the next room. A full half of what you are doing is concealed from you. Are there weeds on my fly? Has the hook fouled itself around the feathers again? Which way is the fly line wrapped around my rod? Is the ocean really there at all? I remember one time my fly kept dragging strangely and getting hung up, and I finally walked over in the dark and found I’d been casting onto a sandbar for the last five minutes. On one particularly frightening occasion, I got turned around after fighting a particularly nasty bluefish and forgot which way the land was (now I always carry a compass, even when wading).
When I was younger, I’d night fish nearly every early Saturday night/Sunday morning, and bring home a peace offering of bagels to my family, generally just after they had woken up. As I drove home, people were gathering at churches, and I couldn’t help but think that I had already been there, that just as the believer’s prayers go out to some unseen, but felt force, I too had reached out into the unknown and acted on faith.
The fear, blindness, the intense concentration on my actions was my own high, intimidating cathedral; both make us feel so small, insignificant. The endless black sea, the star-filled sky. The echoing voices of a choir, the priest calling out his words, full and forceful. The sounds of the surf, all those sighs and murmurings and no rushing roaring boat traffic no rumble of car tires to diminish them.
To fish at night you must move inward in your effort to possess that outward, unseen thing. This describes the essence of spiritual quests as well. I think of the ending of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” how a blind man holds onto the narrator’s hand as the narrator draws the image of a cathedral for him in order to show him more viscerally than he can describe with mere words what it looks like. Eventually, the blind man tells him to close his eyes, to draw with them closed, and the narrator has an epiphany, thinking “it was unlike anything in his life up to then,” this self-imposed blindness, hand in hand with a blind man becoming a whole new way of seeing (knowing, understanding) for him.
You owe it to yourself as an angler, and especially as a fly angler, to fish at night, to impose its blindness, its deeper sight. And, as with going to church, I’d urge you to do it on a regular basis. It may even be unlike anything in your life up to now.
The alarm sounds. 2AM. Four hours ago you turned in. Everything is in the car already. You make coffee, grab a banana, head out half awake. The roads are empty. There are bound to be lots of deer as the leaves come down relentlessly, and they move, like the big stripers, relentlessly toward another meal in this last moment of plenty before the cold descends. You drive cautiously until road meets sea. You step into the cold of your rubber waders, strap your basket around your waist, rig up in the dim trunk light, then head out across the sand toward where sea meets land.
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Thanks, Seve!
beautiful stuff.