News and Events for Nantucket Island
It was looking very much like one of those days. Three plus hours into our beach charter excursion and nary a hookup. Each of us had at least one fish blow up on our respective fishing lures, but somehow all of the attacking fish had dodged our hooks. The only thing biting were the mosquitoes and green head flies. Alas, our time was up and it looked like we had to take the long ride back from Great Point with a skunk tagging along. That is not my favorite thing, let me tell ya…
Blues music is about the realities of life. It expresses the ebb and flow of our human emotions, focusing mostly on the melancholy. When we’re sad, we have the blues. When we want to move away from that sadness, we can chase the blues away with music. Musically, it’s the famous 1-3-5 chord progression and a call and response lyric. But here on Nantucket, we’re often chasing the blues and trying our best to catch them. Never more so than this August, as the inaugural August Blues fishing tournament is ready to hit the Nantucket inshore fishing community.
Be prepared! Ah, yes, the old Boy Scout motto. No better time to be prepared than when you’re out on some remote beach, far from what passes for civilization on this little island of ours. It’s important to remember the 6 P’s: Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance! Here’s a couple entries from my fishing log that illustrates the importance of preparedness.
Beach fishing doesn’t have to be a solitary experience. Sure, you’re not going to hang out with a lot of people if you’re out fishing a slack tide at zero dark thirty, but there’s lots of time to meet new people when you’re out in the daylight. And that’s how I met Brian and Tracy Majczak. We were introduced while fishing with friends at Great Point on a Sunday afternoon. They are the kind of people you instantly like. Tracy, a first grade teacher, is a warm, happy person who just brightens the world. Brian is a solid, steady guy who lives to fish. Yeah, these are my kinds of people! And it got even better when Brian and I discovered that we share September birth dates (I arrived 11 years ahead of Brian). How could I not want to hang out with these two?
“If you’re not real smart, you need smart friends.” I think this quote comes from Albert Einstein. Or maybe Yogi Berra. Who knows—maybe I said it. Regardless, there’s a lot of truth to this, right? Expert advice is a really great way to go when you want to get a question answered. And I am fortunate enough to have a bunch of smart friends, particularly when the questions involve fishing for striped bass. So it seemed like exactly the right time to ask them a bass fishing question. The question was as follows…
You know that you’re operating at less than genius level if you manage to bury your truck in the beach sand. And if you do this while out in the middle of nowhere, in a place with zero cell phone reception, your IQ score is even lower. Finally, if you manage to achieve all of this when it’s three o’clock in the morning, you can be pretty certain that you’ve won the golden dunce cap. That was exactly where your friend Stevie was in early June about four years ago, covered in beach sand and mosquito bites, praying for someone to come driving by to rescue me from my self-inflicted predicament. And it was in this situation where I first met Noah Karberg.
There are certainly some interesting sights to be seen on Nantucket beaches these days. Now hold on just a minute…I’m not commenting on the new law that allows everyone to run around topless. It’s still a bit chilly for that anyway, don’t you think? No, the interesting sight that I saw is good, G-rated and beautiful (um, not that the other won’t be, perhaps). Just let me explain before I dig this hole any deeper.
The text from my buddy Greg said, “The morning bite has been hot at Point O’ Breakers. Let’s hit it tomorrow.” Greg is a hard charger who puts in his beach time fishing for striped bass. I knew that his information was solid, so we agreed to meet around 4:00 a.m. and fish until we had to leave for work. This was in early June a couple of years ago and the striper fishing had been sporadic. Greg and I fished hard that next morning, with each of us picking up some short fish (less than the 28 inch minimum) in the darkness.
You’ve waited all winter, dreaming of getting back out there for the new season. You’ve relived moments from the past season, moments of success, of failure, dreaming endlessly of what could have been. But that was then, this is now. It’s time for the 2023 fishing season to get going.
