David Siskind | Sunday, 30 March 2025
So I’m leaving for NY to visit Jackie in the city with a side-trip planned to visit my daughter. I haven’t seen her for six months. She and her boyfriend left the Bay Area in late September, came here for a visit, and drove across the country, stopping in Jackson Hole briefly to get married. They wintered on Block Island; a summer vacation destination. It's beyond quiet during the off-season. Located midway between Long Island’s north fork and Rhode Island, it is right in the middle of the migration route for the big stripers leaving their spawning grounds in the lower reaches of the Hudson River and Chesapeake bay. Unfortunately my visit will be a month-and-a-half too early. Two months for the blues. Too bad. There are many many ponds on the island but I’m not sure I want to bother transporting my stuff to fish them.
I’m from Long Island and started fishing in the sound and the bays for flounder and snapper blues (young of the year). For years there were snappers only in the bays, then I think in 1965 or ‘66 some upperclassmen moved in, and every year thereafter. They got bigger and bigger until they were around 10 lbs and attracted the attention of the big party boats (head boats). These oversized craft invaded my little bay and we called it quits. There were also stripers around. A sandbar which was bone-dry at low tide provided the structure at our favorite spot. My buddy Marty and I would don waders on a midnight summer tide and wade out on the bar. We’d recruit a couple of horseshoe crabs, which we found bumping against our feet, and stand on them to get a couple of inches extra height. We could hear the stripers splashing around in the dark - they’d eat rapalas. We’d step off the crabs when the tide ebbed a bit.
About five years later, when I was a working stiff living in brooklyn, I had an eight-weight glass Fenwick that I used for largemouth bass and a Medalist. I fashioned a shooting head from lead core trolling line, tied up some sort of deceiver with some white bucktail and a big grizzly saddle hackle, drove it out to my old spot and caught my first saltwater fish (a striper) on a fly. I’ve never been back there but I used the same rig to catch bonito off a jetty in Redondo Beach (South Bay in Los Angeles) Recently, in the course of writing in this space I found that there are a lot of fly fishers working the salt in my old haunts. Many have been at it for a long time. Even the famed Enrico Puglisi had a fly shop walking distance from my ancestral home before moving to Florida. I had no idea.
David Siskind