Collateral Damage

Originally trained on Maine lobster (mm, tomalley) with a four-year degree in Japanese sushi (minor in sashimi), your correspondent is voraciously piscivorous. Shad? Sardines? Little crispy smelts? Lemme at em! And yet, I almost never kill and eat a striped bass for a very simple reason: I'm already mad enough without further increasing the mercury levels underneath my hat. Big stripers get plenty of mercury concentrated in their flesh after years and years of eating thousands of smaller fish, each packing its own little toxic punch. Naturally there are many fisher folk out there who love to kill and keep a big show-off fish, but god save their brains and livers. I release big stripers and only very occasionally keep a small one to sautee.

Now, about the nine pound, 28-inch striper I am about to describe here -- we DID try to release him. I hooked him on a plug with only the rear treble hook attached, and I fought him in as fast as I could to keep him from getting fatally overtaxed. If anyone needs proof of that, witness exhibit A, the remains of said plug:


Obviously, that fish was pulling hard. And I think I know why: when we got him boatside, he was bleeding profusely out of his gills. The hook -- including the bent tine -- was firmly in his bony lip, but I theorize that he swallowed it deep on the initial take, and ripped the hook up through one of his gills before embedding it deep in the lip. Ouch! And dang. This is sad. Stripers are tough customers (I once knifed and clubbed a small one before watching it jump off my kayak deck and swim away), so we figured on giving him a chance to recover . . . but he bellied up, and we ended up scooping him back up with the net.

This sad death through collateral damage is unfortunate, but not an entire waste. For one, my neighbor's cat Jose got to scarf up some delightful little scraps of fish innards.



The neighbor herself, who states firmly that she will have no more kids and can therefore handle a little mercury, got a nice three pound filet to bake. A highly piscivorous friend down in Santa Cruz took the other filets with a vow to mate it with lemongrass and other good things. And, last but not least, I made a lovely little lemon-and-capers sautee out of the tail ends for Sunday lunch. Probably none of this fine unfortunate fish will go into the freezer to be forgotten for months, which is surely the fate of so many of the 'trophy' stripers that people kill and keep.

This fish was landed on a small but well-rigged motorboat belonging to my friend Mike. It is a MUCH better platform for fly casting than a kayak, and I do hope he'll take me out again despite the blood and savagery that I brought onto the clean floor of his boat. The spot is good kayaking grounds, too, and overall this is a good sign of striper happiness to come. Can't wait until the delta starts turning on!

As a side note, you may notice over the course of these blogs that your correspondent is rather hard on equipment, including reels run over by trucks, rods broken while wave surfing, and plugs twisted into scraps by stripers. I'm reminded of a time when I somehow ended up watching a bit of "Survivorman" on TV with some of my 'indoor friends.' They said to me,

"Hey Gillie, this is the kind of stuff you do out there, right? Eat bugs and sleep in swamps, right?" And I said,

"Wrong. I buy the best equipment I can afford, surround myself with it, and then destroy it piece by piece."

Some casualties of the summer in Alaska: middle pole of MSR four-season tent; new handheld depth finder; Altitech barometer clock (which wasn't as waterproof as it claimed); third in a series of surprisingly fragile GPS units; and so on. Certainly a few fish died and got digested, but all of that was intentional. Going forward, I will keep striving to hold down the collateral damage.