First you smell the pungent, sweet odor of juvenile menhaden (peanut bunker we call them in these parts), which means somewhere beneath you they are being chopped to pieces. Then the gulls and terns start spiraling closer to the surface, and you know it’s about to begin. Fifty feet away, all hell breaks loose. You frantically paddle your kayak into the midst of a crashing, churning, boiling, gull-screaming, bluefish-jaw-snapping frenzy. You make a few quick back strokes with the paddle to slow down and start working out fly line, casting toward one of the many explosions, but in an instant, the chaos moves from razor-teeth-snapping-right-beside-you to back-where-you-just-were before you can even get your fly in the water. You strip in fast and give chase, and just as you arrive into the center of this blitz, they have moved another 100 yards off; the birds shift, tornadoing to the new spot, diving for scraps, screaming, screaming.
Then they are all around you, crashing up hard through the silvery waves of peanut bunker, gulls shouting right in your ears; you can feel the air from the beating of their wings. Four or five terns ride the back of a particularly large bluefish who is driving waves of bait out in front of it. Not wanting to hook a bird (you have played that game before), you keep your cast low and close—no need for double hauls here—and start moving your flashy foam popper fast through the churning chaos. One takes hold and instantly rushes back through the blitz when it feels you strip-set the hook. Sometimes, when they do this, another blue sees the streaking line cutting through the surface, attacks above the wire leader and cuts the line. Now it’s behind you, the kayak swinging 180 degrees, and you’re being towed along. Forget how tired you are after a half hour of chasing under the hot summer sun. Forget it was starting to seem as if you’d never triangulate it right. Forget everything but this big bad bluefish, bending your fly rod hard, still pulling off line, your kayak now making a nice wake as you move on across the harbor. Finally, you regain some line, then some more, and you catch that first glimpse, and with blues you are frequently surprised at how small they are, a 5 or 6 pounder you could have sworn would go 15, 20. You carefully ease it alongside the kayak, knowing there will likely be another explosion once it sees you and the gravity of the situation becomes more clear. Its big eyes that can see as well above as below the surface are watching everything, willing you to come a little closer to those perfect triangles of razor-sharp teeth, to be careless just for a moment. You make that fast stab at the place just behind its eyes, where you can hold it hard and still and slip your long-nose pliers out from where you keep them easily at hand (there have been too many close calls when they shake loose, make a desperate lunge for a digit). The barbless hook comes out with one deft twist and pull, and without admiring him much (the blitz is still going on, now just behind you), you swing the kayak around and start again.
With bluefish it’s a macho thing—busting in on the party, tapping one on the shoulder, stepping outside. In a kayak, fishing with a fly rod, my preferred tools, this is especially true. On days with rough seas they have a way of turning you into the waves so you take on water, of tugging you out away from the harbor’s protective shores where the seas are a foot higher, the winds stronger, of making that crazed last surge when they’re close and you think spent, the tip of your rod suddenly yanked down deep under the bow and unmovable, as if the very bottom of the ocean were pulling against you.
The muscularity of it, the hard, physical labor of catching bluefish in a kayak with a fly rod, the inversion of something we usually consider “calming” and even “contemplative,” strikes to the core of why I love it. It is as physically challenging as anything I can think of, leaving your upper body and arms and hands strong as, well, a bluefish. It calls upon pushing your most physical, most animal self to its limits. Where I live in southern Connecticut I have many excellent fly fishing options—The Farmington and Housatonic trout waters not but an hour or so away from me, numerous ponds, rivers, lakes. In the salt waters of Long Island Sound, one can seek out more “refined” pursuits: the powerful and sometimes trout-wily striped bass, from late summer into early fall, the fantastically fast false albacore, in early spring, the occasional weakfish.... But sometimes the thought of “matching the hatch,” trying for the perfect drift-free float over a trout who has already seen hundreds of poorly cast flies and maybe even been hooked a few times, deciphering currents and insect etymology (all things that at times do appeal to me very much) is simply not what I need. And as the summer stretches on, and the striper game shifts to the wee hours of the morning, or even requires sleeping from late afternoon until midnight, then setting out in the pitch black (another thing I sometimes relish)… As the trout streams warm up and their flows lessen, often these days to drought levels… I’m always grateful that the blues come in any light or weather, on any tide and more often than not, will hit anything that moves.
I was especially grateful to bluefish when I first moved from Michigan to Connecticut and was trying to learn the ropes of catching fish with a fly rod in a body of water so large that fish could gather and feed in one bay or river mouth one day and the very next be a hundred miles away, across the sound to Long Island, up to the beaches of Rhode Island. In those early days, after a small, feisty blue managed to rip every single feather off a carefully tied deceiver, and another blue came up and hit the bare 4/0 hook when I left it trolling in the water as I drifted dangerously close to a jetty (which the former blue had attempted to tow me into), I realized my fly selection should match the direct, primitive joy of this pursuit and be as simple and rugged as the fish I was trying to catch. Now I use only one fly for bluefish. I core out a few inches of foam from an old red swimming kickboard I found washed up on the beach one day, slice it down the middle with a razor and super glue, Goop or Aquaseal it (if I really want it to last) to a long shank hook. Then I buy a roll of two inch wide sparkle ribbon from a craft store, cut a 4-5 inch length and hot glue it to the foam body. Lastly, with another hook, I pull out the plastic strands of the ribbon to give it a nice, undulating “tail.” The real beauty of this fly is that once it is chewed to pieces, I can easily just glue on another strip of ribbon-flash material. To the hook eye, I attach 3-5 inches of #8 piano wire with a haywire twist, and (like Willie Wonka’s gobstoppers), I have an “everlasting” bluefish popper. Sure, sometimes you’ll catch a few more if you go deep with a clouser you are willing to sacrifice, but the thrill of catching them on the surface just seems more appropriate (and fun).
And as I slowly learned the ropes, my admiration for and fascination with bluefish steadily expanded with every outing, every story I heard or read about or experienced. A friend tells of wading near a reef at low tide and coming upon the carcass of a rather large blue whose head was jammed between the seaweed and barnacle encrusted rocks of the reef. As best he could surmise, the blue had been chasing bait into the crevices between the rocks and attacked so fiercely it became stuck and suffocated in the air when the tide receded. (Would that I could ever display such dogged resoluteness!)
One time, and I swear this is true, a rather large and particularly nasty blue appeared from the depths and started circling my kayak at the end of my line, giving me disdainful looks (anthropomorphize away!), then turned and charged my kayak, all with my fly firmly planted in the side of its mouth. It did this several times, quite nearly knocking itself out in the process, ignoring the obvious, that he was prey and I the predator.
I have seen blues turn sideways in shallow water to more efficiently attack peanut bunker, swimming fast and hard in just 6 inches of water, silver waves of bait fleeing in front of them. And these waves of peanuts will often leap right into my kayak, dozens of them at a time, hoping to escape.
The drive to catch bluefish has, at times, pushed me to do things I’m not comfortable admitting to fellow fly anglers. When no fly will work because the blues are chopping 2-4 pound adult bunker (menhaden) to pieces, a bloody froth in the water, the smell overpowering, the bunker schooled into tight spinning balls, each of them trying to find its way to the center and safety, I tie on my “bunker fly”—a bare 7/0 hook attached to a 10” wire leader (no, I am not a fly fishing purist). I cast right into the center of the bait ball, let the hook sink a bit, then start stripping it in with quick, hard tugs... My goal is to snag an adult bunker. When I do, it’s like fighting a small blue or striper, the rod bent nearly double, the bunker large and strong and terrified. I pull him out of the safety of the bait ball and wait. It never takes long before a blue attacks, and it is all you can do to hold on as he cuts into the bunker. Yes, I know, it is ugly and bloody and hard to defend as a fly fisherman, but there is something indescribable and thrilling about being attached to the other end of the way a blue hits his actual, living, especially large prey that it first must stun and cut before having its meal. Sometimes the line goes still with an unmoving weight attached to it, and I reel in just a bunker head or tail, see the C shape of the blues’ bite. If I leave the half-bunker out there long enough, as I might have dangled a small bit of worm in the shallows teasing bluegills as a child, something is likely to take hold, and often, right alongside the kayak, I’ll see 4 or 5 hungry bluefish come for it, banging against each other, against the side of my kayak, as I toy with them, lifting the bait out of the water, watching their hungry eyes and razor teeth.
The more blues I have caught, the more my appreciation has grown. Perhaps it’s the competitor in me, years of playing hard and fast in pickup basketball games and on weekend warrior soccer teams, playing tennis on mid to high level USTA team that so attracts me to targeting bluefish with my fly rod. Perhaps something about it pulls me back to the days of my youth when fishing always meant riding my one-speed bike somewhere with my older brother alongside and fighting my way through prickers and weeds, ready to run like hell when an angry owner came after us or the local cop. Fishing for blues in the way I prefer summons a certain primitive intensity I all too often restrain or push aside in other parts of my life. The scream of the gulls and terns become a kind of a battle cry; and I can’t help but feel a rush of vulnerability when rushing into a pod of blitzing blues afloat in a small plastic vessel propelled only by the strength of my own arms—and casting out that 2-4 inches of the simplest of noise making concoctions at the end of my not-even-a-pound graphite rod. And when I become attached to their raw, untamed power (often only holding on for dear life), something simple, direct, pure begins as everything else in my brain narrows down and homes in on the absolute need to stay alert, to counter strength with strength, to do whatever it takes to complete the capture.
Holding onto a bluefish, looking right into its eyes, one looks into the most elemental of needs—to be physical, to be fit and strong and hungry, to hunt for and capture at all cost the thing you have stalked now all around you. As the blues swirl and chase, I swirl and chase. As they lunge for and capture, I cast toward and capture. I am right there in the midst of the chaos with them, playing their game, becoming like them, barely noticing their thuggish beauty when I carefully remove my fly and hold them in the air. Though surely they are beautiful in their own way, sleek and powerful, aesthetic contemplation is not what this is about. I am beyond that; I have gone full-caveman-angler, am tapping deep into what my thesis director from graduate school, the writer John Edgar Wideman, once described in an interview I did with him for a small literary magazine as the “reptilian brain.” As John described it, this part of the psyche is as important, as critical—especially to the artist—as the more refined, more logical part we often hold in higher esteem.
To be an “advanced” human being, bluefishing has taught me, doesn’t necessarily mean turning your back on our “animal” or more “primitive” selves, this part of us as essential as anything else that constitutes the unfathomably complex organisms we have become. Thoreau in the woods of Walden struggles with this mightily. At one point he sings the praises of catching your own game and fish and eating it and surviving off the bounty of the earth as a way of returning yourself to something more vitally essential, moving away from a society that coddles and keeps people removed from their truer natures. But later in the same chapter, he seems to make the argument for evolving beyond the need to eat other creatures at all, leaving the reader with a contradiction to ponder.
Art and other essential things come directly from that “reptilian brain”—a balance of the more “evolved” and “rational” somehow merged with the elemental and primitive. Chasing bluefish and then writing about it is surely like that balance Wideman spoke with me about in his small office years ago. For me, writing would simply not be possible if not for the more visceral urges I seek to gratify when going to battle with blues in nearby bays and river mouths. Ah, but I’m getting far too abstract. Bluefish play a simple game: attack, eat, survive. To catch them is to become like them, embracing their simple, powerful, terrifying, thrilling, all encompassing world . . .and amidst that turmoil I occasionally emerge victorious and with something to say about it.
Some summers they show practically every day, at low and high tide, slack and moving tides, hot and cold, rainy and dry days, the only thing predictable their unpredictability. But when they show, I make chase and do battle. Sometimes I wait for them in the undulating tide, just feeling the ocean holding me aloft in my twelve feet of plastic. Sometimes in these quiet moments other overwhelming waves from my life, things far more nuanced and complex, well up behind me, but I always manage to keep them at bay as I look toward the horizon, eyes straining, knowing any minute now they might show.
*Link to the video in New Haven harbor the stills above were taken from. *
Upgrading to a paid subscription will help me greatly in the creation of this newsletter (and in paying my bills). You can make a one-time contribution HERE.
You can listen to my podcast on the works of Ernest Hemingway HERE
You can watch my introduction to my YouTube series on Film Noir HERE