By Sam Fellman
A flock of terns and gulls darted over the Breezy Point jetty, plucking bait fish out of the sea as the Capt. Dave II arrived. The men on the charter fishing trip knew that where there’s bait fish, there are stripers.
“Holy cow!” one said, spotting them. “I told you it’s going to be a great one.”
It was three weeks into the striped bass season and the 19 fishermen, eager to catch the stately fish as it migrates east along Long Island, rushed to the sides of the 65-foot-long boat and dropped their lines into the water. Even the boat captain, from the deck above, joined in. Ocean waves rocked the boat expectantly.
“Fish on! Fish on!” a man called from the aft deck.
Danny Freundlich, a stout Hasidic man from Brooklyn, reeled in the first catch of the day. One of the ship’s mates netted the striped bass and dropped it on deck. This was Freundlich’s first fishing trip and the two-and-a-half-foot-long striper the first catch of his life.
He hunched over the fish for a photo. But the striper thrashed across the deck and he recoiled. A friend told him to pick it up.
“I’m not touching it!” Freundlich said. “I don’t do this sort of thing. I go to restaurants.”
Striped bass – known as stripers – are a regal fish: white-bellied with green stripes, wide mouths, and a dorsal fin like a spiky sail. They can live as long as 30 years. And because they are less oily than bluefish, sport fishermen regard them as one of the most prized catches in the Northeast.
Two more stripers landed on the deck as the sun dipped under New Jersey in the distance. The Capt. Dave II had left pier three at Sheepshead Bay less than forty-five minutes earlier. In the wheelhouse, Captain Mike Mazza – who was in charge since the owner, Dave Paris was ashore – was pleased.
“Hey Steven,” he radioed to the captain of the Sea Queen nearby. “Got three of them on bait.”
“Already?” her captain responded.
But the luck wasn’t to last. The stripers stopped striking after sundown. That left the Capt. Dave II at the mercy of seas growing choppy in a cold wind.
“This used to be a lot better,” admitted Mazza, known to all as Capt. Mike. An auto mechanic by day, Capt. Mike has been a boat captain for 15 years and noticed there were only two other fishing boats out tonight. “Used to come out here on a night like this – there was a hundred boats,” he said.
Capt. Mike turned the fishing boat back around the Q-Tip-shaped Rockaway peninsula and passed under the Marine Parkway Bridge. Jamaica Bay was dark and still. From the captain’s chair, Capt. Mike steered with a leg through the helm, his eyes scanning the SI-Tex fishfinder mounted above his head. He was looking for red blips near the bottom that meant big fish. When he spotted some, he blew the horn.
Down below, Ted Dach dropped his line off the port-side gunwale, just outside the sliding door to the cabin. Wearing yellow bib overalls and a raincoat over a gray sweatshirt, Dach stood with his feet squared to the side like a ballplayer in a batter’s box. He balanced the fishing rod on the railing, rocking it back and forth to entice the stripers below.
Dach has been out boating with Capt. Dave for a long time, longer than he can remember. And he knows fish.
Not long ago, Dach was at a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan, and ordered a sushi roll with red snapper. But when it arrived, he could tell the tail was too thin to be red snapper, so he told the waiter.
“The waiter just looks at it and says, ‘Red snapper, red snapper.’”
“Here I am, I’m looking at it and I know it’s not red snapper,” but rather yellowtail, which tastes equally good, he said. “I give up.”
After retiring from an accounts payable department at a big Manhattan company that he would rather not name, the 65-year-old fisherman said he comes out on the boat three or four or five times a week. He is not married and has no children, but said that, “If I had them, I’d drag them out here with me.”
Dach’s first fishing trip was when his father brought him to Steeplechase pier on Coney Island when he was five. Back then, he said, everyone was catching porgy – a small, tasty fish – right off the pier. Now they’re harder to find, while other species like mackerel or whitings, once so plentiful they used to litter the beach, have disappeared.
“Years ago, I saw boats come back with swordfish, marlin, even sharks,” Dach said.
Over 60 years of fishing, Dach has landed prize catches. A 70-pound cow-nosed ray. Sandsharks. Spiny dogfish. A fluke over 10 pounds – “Some people go through their whole life only catching a five or six pound fluke,” he said. And he caught 42 stripers in one day, he added.
Dach felt a nibble on his sandworm-baited hook 29 feet below. Then a stronger one. He swung around on the rod.
“Fish on!” he yelled, cranking on the reel.
Mate Danny Paris, Capt. Dave’s nephew, rushed over with the net. Dach tried to steer the fish into the net but missed, prompting some ribbing from the mate.
“Remember,” Dach replied, “I used to work on a boat, back in 1902.”
On a second try, the fish came in. Danny, a strong, balding angler with a ruddy complexion, unhooked the striper and carried it over to the measuring decal on the cabin window. 27 inches; one inch short of legal. With a shrug, he heaved the bass back into the water.
It was nearing midnight. Capt. Mike turned the boat towards the pier while the crew and boat riders gathered on the aft deck for the ritual of filleting the catch. All told, there had been eight catches on the day, two by Dach, but only six keepers. One of the mates yanked a large striper from a bucket and scraped off its silvery scales on a metal stand. Danny then cut it into a filet. After each slice, the fish blood oozed onto the metal.
Beer in hand, Shlomo Klein, a tefillin maker from Brooklyn, looked on from the ladder with one of his friends. Although Klein organized the trip, he was coming back empty-handed. Still, it had been a good day. Between the four Hasidic friends, they’d bagged two fish, both kosher – “a kosher fish has fins and scales,” he explained.
His friend was new to fishing, so as his friend’s catch neared the chopping table, Klein laid out his options. Filets or steaks – “you could even chop it up and make gefilte,” he suggested.
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