Images by Peter Fisher
The wave comes, throat-high and hungry. The very last thing I see earlier than it sweeps me off the rock and into the ocean is a person in a wetsuit leaning his shoulder right into a wall of water. Once we swam out right here round 2 a.m. and hoisted ourselves onto the algae-slick face of a boulder, he had warned me: “When you go in right here, it gained’t be enjoyable.” And he was proper.
I handle to maintain maintain of my fishing rod, and I’m reeling in misplaced line and treading water and making an attempt to overlook all of the tales I’ve heard about sharks as a second giant wave begins sucking me up its face. By the point the third crashes over me, I’ve deserted any pretense of swimming again to our unique perch. Sputtering and coughing, I make my approach towards one other rock nearer to shore. A final wave pushes me onto it, and I get my toes underneath me.
Thirty yards in entrance of me, having held on to that sloping rock by way of the whole set, Brandon Sausele makes an extended, arcing forged into the pounding surf.
Sausele is 27 years outdated. Shaggy-haired, tattooed, and muscular, he’s a loyal practitioner of an excessive sport referred to as “wetsuiting,” which is each simple to explain and not possible for the uninitiated to know. After I was first stepping into the game a number of years in the past, the recommendation I acquired from one other fisherman was merely: Don’t.
Wetsuiting is a type of saltwater fishing that includes sporting a wetsuit and wading or swimming out to offshore rocks—virtually completely at evening, usually throughout storms—to entry deeper water or sooner currents than could be reached in conventional waders. The quarry are striped bass, a fish that migrates each spring, principally from the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, to as far north as Maine, and again down once more within the fall.
Though “stripers”—some of the standard recreation fish in America—could be caught throughout regular waking hours, the biggest members of the species, some greater than 4 toes lengthy, normally come near shore at evening. Stripers choose inclement climate and tough water, which make ambushing their prey simpler, but additionally make circumstances extra harmful for the boys—wetsuiters are practically all males—who chase them.
Catching massive stripers requires dedication and sleep deprivation. And when you’re wetsuiting, it includes greater than a bit of danger. The hazards of this passion, coupled with the truth that most of us who do it don’t even maintain the fish we catch, are sometimes baffling to outsiders, who fairly moderately surprise why we hassle. Maybe not surprisingly, wetsuiting has lengthy attracted extremely explicit personalities: cranks, brooding fight veterans, adrenaline junkies, recovering alcoholics, and religious questers.
Fishing for striped bass from the shore—referred to as “surf casting”—was as soon as a pastime for the wealthy, who created golf equipment and constructed “bass stands” in locations resembling Newport and Cuttyhunk Island within the 1800s. However what Sausele does, wetsuiting, was born within the mid-Twentieth century in Montauk, New York, again when it was a hardscrabble fishing city. Who precisely invented the game is a matter of considerable debate, but it surely’s typically agreed on that by the early Nineteen Sixties, a handful of males had been donning wetsuits and swimming typically 100 yards or extra by way of the churning surf to achieve the sandbars and outer rocks on Montauk’s shores.
Montauk’s geography is uniquely excellent for the game. Located on the japanese tip of Lengthy Island’s South Fork, which some name merely “The Finish,” the city has a mixture of sand seashores, boulder fields, and ripping currents that gives an excellent habitat for stripers, and a singular problem for many who hunt them. By most requirements, I’m a critical wetsuiter; I’m going out some 80 nights a yr. However I used to be not totally ready for the nights I spent on Lengthy Island this summer time, fishing with some of the celebrated anglers on Montauk’s shoreline.
Wetsuiters usually discuss about their “profession” in fishing, and Sausele has already had a adorned run. He has seven Montauk Surfmasters event victories to his identify and a “50” underneath his belt. Catching a 50-pound striped bass is an achievement that the majority spend their life chasing, and only a few attain.
In the course of the day, Sausele works as a pipeline-rehabilitation specialist, touring the nation to restore strains that carry water, chemical substances, and pure fuel. However like most die-hard wetsuiters, he treats fishing as his second job, which implies forgoing something approaching a wholesome sleep schedule. Sausele frequently fishes from sundown to dawn earlier than driving 90 minutes from Montauk again house to vary; then he goes straight to work. This isn’t unusual: Most devoted wetsuiters are out within the surf a number of nights per week from Could to November. Some junkies log 100 or extra nights a yr.
On this extended state of sleep deprivation, wetsuiters should maintain fixed monitor of moon phases, bait migration, wind path, tide swings, present pace, water temperature, swell and surf circumstances—figuring out {that a} single mistake can spell harm or worse. Wetsuiters pursue a fish, sure, but additionally an outdated and really human query: What can a physique do?
I sought out Sausele as a result of he’s fisherman, actually good, but additionally as a result of he’s, as he himself places it, one in every of a dying breed. By Sausele’s estimate and that of different Montauk fishermen I talked with, solely about 5 – 6 hard-core wetsuiters fish The Finish frequently right now, down from dozens within the ’90s and 2000s. (Many native fishermen nonetheless put on a wetsuit, however vanishingly few swim out to Montauk’s far-flung reefs at evening.)
Partially that’s as a result of Montauk has lengthy since change into a trip spot for influencers and Wall Avenue guys, pushing out the working class and making it more durable for fishermen to seek out reasonably priced locations to remain. It’s additionally as a result of striper numbers have dropped after years of insufficient conservation. However simply as a lot as any of those causes, it’s a narrative about sharks. As a result of if there’s one factor conserving Montauk wetsuiters shorebound, it’s the shark inhabitants. Sausele usually takes to Instagram to share movies and pictures of enormous bass bitten in half by “the tax man” whereas he’s reeling them in, in addition to different encounters he has with giant sharks whereas precariously perched on offshore rocks, most of that are submerged, leaving him belly-deep with predators larger than he’s. In a single video, he releases what seems to be like a large bull shark at evening. It had hooked itself after consuming a bluefish on his line.
If this sounds insane, that’s as a result of it’s. Wetsuiters are all mad, they usually at all times have been. Spending sleepless evening after sleepless evening as much as your chest within the riotous Atlantic, searching fish the scale of a preschooler, isn’t a passion that people who find themselves psychologically grounded pursue. (I don’t exempt myself from this cost.) Many disciples discuss their relationship with the game as a sort of habit. Quite a lot of have misplaced marriages and jobs of their determined quest for this fish. Some have misplaced their life.
I went all the way down to Lengthy Island in June and once more in July—a time of yr when shark run-ins are widespread—to swim to the outer rocks with Sausele in an try to know why he dangers life and limb, chasing large fish solely to launch them, with nothing however the occasional Instagram submit and some hundred likes to indicate for it.
Wetsuiters have a mantra: “Boat fish don’t depend.” It’s usually stated tongue in cheek, however most of us form of imply it. I’ve thought concerning the which means of this phrase rather a lot: on the lengthy drives to my fishing spots; whereas wading out, neck-deep, to sandbars in white-shark territory; in a parking zone, gearing as much as fish the bleeding fringe of a hurricane. Boat fish don’t depend as a result of, typically, boat fishing can’t kill you.
I arrive in Montauk in the course of the first week of June, my spouse and seven-month-old in tow. We haven’t been away collectively since our son was born, so we determined to make the journey a household affair, staying in one of many rental houses which might be serving to drive up the city’s housing costs. We get in on a Monday afternoon and spend the night like vacationers, ingesting South Fork rosé at a picnic desk and watching the solar sink into Lake Montauk.
Twenty-four hours later, Brandon Sausele is giving me a agency handshake in a dirt-and-gravel parking zone. Though we talked on the cellphone a number of instances within the months main as much as my journey, Sausele takes me a bit of without warning. You would possibly count on a person who swims by way of a shark-infested ocean at evening to be brash and filled with swagger. Sausele will not be quiet, however he’s understated and modest. He asks me questions on my gear, whether or not I like a sure model of hook, if I’ve ideas on a sure sort of “plug” (a synthetic lure). It’s a bit like if Phil Mickelson requested an newbie golfer his opinion on a specific 9 iron.
After a couple of minutes of chitchat, we’re piling into Sausele’s truck and driving to a second location, the place we’ll slip into our wetsuits and put together for the evening. He tells me he doesn’t wish to prepare in the identical place that he’s fishing in case he’s acknowledged by one other wetsuiter who would possibly attempt to horn in on his chunk. (This sort of secrecy is typical—I’ve my very own comparable routines and rituals that shade from privateness into paranoia.)
We take our time getting our gear collectively: pool-cue-thick rods and waterproof reels made from aircraft-grade aluminum; plug baggage made from sailcloth connected to thick belts made from scuba materials; rust-proof rescue knives; major and backup dive flashlights connected to lanyards made from surgical tubing; nitrile-coated gloves; specialised sneakers referred to as Korkers fitted with carbide cleats designed to grip rock; an assortment of different instruments, together with pliers, stainless-steel D rings, and handheld scales to weigh fish. And eventually, with these sharks in thoughts, tourniquets.
By 8 o’clock, we’ve pushed to a 3rd location, and I’m wading deep into the Montauk surf with Sausele. Our first perches are perhaps 60 yards offshore, a pair of flat rocks that we will attain with out swimming. He directs me to the larger of the 2 and we fish till the blue wash of sky turns purple and the ebbing tide sucks out a bit of farther. He retains a well mannered eye on me.
“All proper,” Sausele declares. Evening has totally set in, and shortly I’m watching Sausele’s darkish type side-stroking by way of the uneven Atlantic, utilizing his 11-foot surf rod to really feel for a selected rock that allegedly lies someplace under the floor. He does this with out turning on his flashlight, in order to not spook the fish; as he later explains, he locates these underwater rocks, which he scouts in the course of the day, by triangulating from numerous onshore landmarks. The water is pushing quick and he begins his swim up present, letting it swing him towards the rock. A couple of minutes later, I can simply make out Sausele’s silhouette standing some 40 yards in entrance of me. He alerts for me to hitch him. I slip into the black water.
As Sausele promised, the rock is a lot massive however awkwardly formed. The water is nicely above my waist, even after I’m standing on the best half. I’ve fished loads of troublesome locations—my house waters provide miles of ledge-studded shoreline, craggy demise traps battered by New England tides—however Montauk is a wholly totally different animal. I’m not used to fishing from rocks which might be this deeply submerged, and the surf is frothing and the present tugs at me. Inside the first 10 minutes, a giant curler is available in and pushes me off into deep water. Sausele extends a hand and pulls me again on just for the subsequent wave to push me off once more. This time, I swim round to the entrance of the boulder and let the subsequent wave deposit me belly-first onto the rock.
We don’t catch any stripers that evening, and my whole physique aches—Sausele stays on that slimy boulder like he’s glued to it, whereas I appear to spend as a lot time swimming again to our rock as I do fishing from it. Nonetheless, the whole affair is deliriously enjoyable. Wetsuiting can really feel illicit, virtually juvenile: courting hazard whereas the remainder of the world sleeps, the sense that one thing thrilling—catching not only a fish, however The Fish—might occur at any second. When the sky brightens over the distant Montauk Level Lighthouse, Sausele’s watch reads 1 / 4 to 5 and we name it quits. We principally float again, paddling with the palms not holding our rods, counting on the buoyancy of our wetsuits and letting the waves push us towards shallow water.
Again onshore, we stand on the rocky seaside, panting frivolously, leaning on our surf rods like canes underneath Montauk’s crumbling bluffs. A sliver of moon is dissolving into the morning. Sausele says he hopes the fishing shall be higher tomorrow.
{The teenager} within the surf store is tanned and stoned. After I inform him I’m engaged on a narrative about fishermen, striped bass, and sharks, his bloodshot eyes flash, his mouth splitting into a smile.
“Oh, the sharks are right here, man.” He leans again on his stool till it’s balanced on two legs. “I’ve seen them two totally different instances. One evening, I used to be out at nightfall. Complete crowd of surfers. And we see this massive fin coming down the lineup. Simply fucking cruising.” He presses his palms collectively and makes them swim like a fish. “Simply fucking cruising,” he repeats. “And we’re all like … shit! ?” I agree, shit. He forgets to inform me concerning the second time he noticed a shark.
It’s been a month since my June journey and I’m again on the town. After I pull into the parking zone round midnight, Sausele is tying a monofilament chief to his braided fishing line, fingers lit up by the beam of a headlamp.
We had fished laborious the day earlier than, assembly at midnight and staying out by way of dawn with solely two bass and a few hefty bluefish, all launched, for our efforts. After I obtained again to the parking zone of my beachside motel that morning, vacationers had been already ambling towards the ocean, weighed down by coolers and sandy seaside chairs. I slept till 10 a.m. Sausele went straight to his job.
It’s the week of July 4, when sandbar sharks and different species usually start exhibiting up in Montauk in massive numbers. Sausele hasn’t had a fish bitten in half but this season, however in the course of the peak of summer time, it may be a weekly, typically each day incidence. He expects his first go to from the tax man any day now, a prospect that doesn’t appear to trigger him a lot anxiousness, although it retains my coronary heart charge up.
Craig O’Connell—the director of the O’Seas Conservation Basis, who’s often known as the “Shark Physician” and has appeared on Shark Week—advised me that on prime of a rising sandbar-shark inhabitants, the Montauk surf can be house to white sharks, duskies, spinners, bulls, and sand tigers (these are reportedly behind Lengthy Island’s current uptick in assaults).
After I requested Oliver Shipley, a marine biologist who research Lengthy Island’s sharks, if he thought it was secure to go wetsuiting at evening throughout Montauk’s summer time months, he set free a peal of laughter. He stated he’s seen a few of Sausele’s Instagram movies. Shipley emphasised that it’s essential to not demonize sharks, and that assaults on people stay terribly uncommon. Although some fishermen really feel just like the shark inhabitants, particularly sandbars, is “exploding,” he stated, it’s truly rebounding after a long time of decline, on account of efficient conservation efforts. However he additionally stated that he personally wouldn’t go swimming after darkish, smelling like fish and eels (widespread striper bait), trying like a harbor seal in black neoprene.
Shipley’s gallows laughter is on my thoughts tonight as I’m pushing out towards an eddy that marks the situation of a submerged rock a brief distance from the one Sausele is already on. I’m uncomfortably conscious of how gentle a human stomach is as I swim. I scramble onto my rock and check out—and fail—to not seem like a wounded seal.
I’ve spent loads of time in New England waters at evening in the course of the peak of our white-shark season. However I’ve by no means truly seen or encountered a white—that are comparatively unusual and infrequently taken with chasing bigger prey than striped bass—whereas the ubiquity of Montauk’s sandbar sharks, in addition to the truth that we’re each chasing the identical fish, means there’s an honest probability I’ll come throughout one in every of them. Whereas I stand on my rock with the tide incoming, bioluminescent algae sparking round my waist, I consider the tales I’ve heard from different Montauk wetsuiters: releasing a big bass solely to listen to the floor erupt 10 toes away as a shark strikes it; exploratory bumps on the leg from curious sandbars; eight-foot-long shadows cruising cresting waves; a big fin surfacing in entrance of your rock, then slipping beneath the floor.
Two of Sausele’s associates be part of us, swimming out by way of the incoming tide. They’re among the many very small variety of folks he fishes (and shares data) with. In the course of the glory days of Montauk wetsuiting, when dozens of fishermen frequently pushed out to the farthest rocks, wetsuiters usually labored in “crews,” cooperating to scout new territory and declare alternative rocks. As Sausele and his associates banter, getting washed off their rocks and cracking jokes at each other’s expense, laughing on the prospect of being eaten, I catch a glimpse of what it might need been like at its peak. As John Papciak, a still-active fisherman who wetsuited in Montauk within the ’90s and early 2000s, advised me, the crews had been in no small half about commiserating amid discomfort.
A season within the surf is an accumulation of petty miseries damaged by fleeting triumphs. Everlasting sand in your boots. The wetsuit that by no means totally dries from one evening to the subsequent. The October waves that hit you within the face and the sensation that you just’ll by no means be heat once more. The trudging, flashlight-free walks by way of the woods or alongside the seaside at evening, making an attempt to maintain your secret spot a secret. The starvation for sleep. And the all-too-real dangers. Papciak warned me that I shouldn’t glamorize wetsuiting, and through our hour-long dialog, he jogged my memory repeatedly how harmful the game is. He talked about an acquaintance who had washed up lifeless within the surf on Cuttyhunk Island, and advised me tales of his personal shut calls. However I additionally seen the twinkle in his eye as he advised them.
Anybody who’s being trustworthy will inform you that wetsuiting is a sport of appreciable torment. However there may be additionally nothing prefer it. If you really feel the bracing hit of a 30- or 40-pound striped bass after six hours of futile casting, and the road goes singing off your reel , and your rod is bucking and the surf is constructing and also you’re making an attempt to carry your rock and maintain your rod and climate the ocean that wishes to say you till immediately, as if by magic, you see a tail the scale of a brush head spraying water at your toes—in that second, the months of ache are all value it.
The reality is, it’s value it even when the fish aren’t there. And so they aren’t in Montauk, at the least this time. Neither are the sharks. None that we see, anyway. We swim off our rocks at 3 a.m. Sausele wants a Purple Bull, one in every of his associates wants a cigarette, and one other must get his automobile into the driveway earlier than his spouse realizes he sneaked out once more. “If one in every of my youngsters wakes her up, I’m fucked,” he says, laughing. Sausele asks if I’m up for regrouping and swimming again out to fish by way of dawn. The one sleep he’s gotten in two days is the 2 hours he grabbed in his truck earlier than we met up tonight.
I haven’t slept rather more than he has, and I’ve an extended drive forward of me. I remind myself that my spouse and son expect me to return in a single piece, and that essentially the most harmful a part of wetsuiting is what occurs not within the water however on the sleep-deprived journey house. I inform him I ought to get again to my motel and rack out for a number of hours.
He understands. His associates disperse. Sausele offers me a fist bump, and I watch him disappear once more beneath a maze of stars. I hearken to the demise rattle of the Atlantic because it sucks sea-polished stones, and one fisherman, again into its embrace.
Via the summer time, I proceed to listen to from Sausele that the fishing in Montauk is hard. Anecdotally, it appears robust in all places. Maine. Massachusetts. Rhode Island. Connecticut. The story is similar. Probably the most proficient wetsuiters I do know report their worst season ever.
So after I return for a 3rd and ultimate journey to The Finish in late July, my expectations are low. “You’re taking what Montauk offers,” Sausele’s good friend tells me as we’re bullshitting on the shore. “And currently she isn’t giving a lot.” However tonight Montauk is beneficiant. Round 1 a.m., Sausele’s rod doubles over. Minutes later, he’s treading in deep water, cradling in his arms a bass that weighed in at 29 kilos, reviving her till she’s able to swim off. “That water’s fucking murky,” Sausele observes with a smile. I do know he’s fascinated by these sandbars that like to steal a simple meal. We spend the remainder of the evening on a minivan-size boulder that Sausele’s crew calls “shark mountain,” the location of his aforementioned bull-shark video. No different fish make an look, and I ponder if that is regular now.
For at the least a decade, anglers, conservationists, and fisheries biologists have been warning that the striped-bass inhabitants is in disaster due to a mix of overfishing and poor spawning years as a result of unusually heat and dry springs and winters. Between industrial fishing, guided charters, and leisure angling, stripers signify a multibillion-dollar business, composed of stakeholders who at all times appear to assume that another person is the issue. The leisure fishermen accuse “the comms” of harvesting too many fish. The industrial fishermen reply by stating that “the recs” kill greater than their share yearly, and {that a} share of launched fish nonetheless die. And on and on.
Within the try to maintain everybody joyful, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Fee has lengthy prevented making the laborious choices—specifically, declaring a moratorium on harvesting striped bass—obligatory to permit striper numbers to rebound. The species’ inhabitants collapsed as soon as earlier than, within the Eighties, and many people assume we’re on the verge of one other collapse, if we’re not there already. If it does occur once more, it could nicely show the ultimate blow to Montauk’s wetsuiting scene.
Like several city that was as soon as a fishing city and is now that and one thing else, Montauk is a sprawl of contradictions. Previously 15 or so years, The Finish has been remodeled right into a summer time gathering spot for the wealthy, a destiny that was maybe inevitable given the proximity to the wealthier Hamptons. Practically each native I spoke with referred, with a point of ambivalence, to the 2008 look of Surf Lodge—a clubby, celebrity-filled resort, the place rooms can begin at $600 an evening in the course of the peak summer time months—because the city’s level of no return. “Our B.C./A.D.,” one stated.
The crusty dive bars that after gave Montauk its character—a neighborhood fishing legend, Invoice Wetzel, advised me that “surf rats” used to tug up a bar stool, nonetheless dripping of their wetsuits—are actually one thing like vestigial organs, touchstones from an earlier second in its evolutionary historical past which might be steadily being pushed to the margins by New Montauk. There are beachside cocktail joints with $22 Negronis. There’s SoulCycle and inexperienced juice. There are Land Rovers with customized golf golf equipment within the passenger seat. There are massive homes with excellent lawns that sit empty 50 weeks out of 52. There are finance boys lined up outdoors the Shagwong Tavern, the place they may dance badly to a nasty DJ on the identical flooring the place industrial fishermen slop beer within the laborious winter.
However for now at the least, in addition they stay—the boys who ply the darkish surf, who fish laborious and sleep little and pull an incredible American fish from the ocean and know, as all fishermen know, that there’s a sort of love that can be violence. And whether it is round nightfall and you’re taking the parkway east towards the lighthouse, and also you drive till you’ll be able to’t drive anymore, you would possibly nonetheless see them. They are going to be altering hooks and checking lights and strapping dive knives to their ankles and heavy belts to their waists. They drink Purple Bull and gas-station espresso and browse texts from their wives that say “Be secure.” And when the solar units over the Atlantic, a number of of those final Ahabs will push out previous the breakers and swim for the horizon.
This text seems within the October 2024 print version with the headline “Boat Fish Don’t Depend.”
