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: “In the event 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 massive 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 authentic 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 below me.
Thirty yards in entrance of me, having held on to that sloping rock by your complete set, Brandon Sausele makes a protracted, arcing solid into the pounding surf.
Sausele is 27 years outdated. Shaggy-haired, tattooed, and muscular, he’s a faithful practitioner of an excessive sport often known as “wetsuiting,” which is each straightforward to explain and inconceivable for the uninitiated to know. After I was first stepping into the game a couple 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 carrying a wetsuit and wading or swimming out to offshore rocks—virtually completely at evening, typically 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, largely from the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, to as far north as Maine, and again down once more within the fall.
Though “stripers”—one of the crucial fashionable sport fish in America—could be caught throughout regular waking hours, the most important members of the species, some greater than 4 toes lengthy, often come near shore at evening. Stripers want inclement climate and tough water, which make ambushing their prey simpler, but additionally make circumstances extra harmful for the lads—wetsuiters are almost all males—who chase them.
Catching huge stripers requires dedication and sleep deprivation. And should you’re wetsuiting, it includes greater than slightly danger. The hazards of this interest, 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 fairly marvel why we trouble. 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—often known 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 have been donning wetsuits and swimming generally 100 yards or extra by the churning surf to succeed in the sandbars and outer rocks on Montauk’s shores.
Montauk’s geography is uniquely good for the game. Located on the jap 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 a perfect habitat for stripers, and a singular problem for individuals who hunt them. By most requirements, I’m a critical wetsuiter; I’m going out some 80 nights a 12 months. However I used to be not totally ready for the nights I spent on Lengthy Island this summer season, fishing with one of the crucial celebrated anglers on Montauk’s shoreline.
Wetsuiters typically speak about their “profession” in fishing, and Sausele has already had a embellished run. He has seven Montauk Surfmasters match victories to his identify and a “50” below his belt. Catching a 50-pound striped bass is an achievement that almost all spend their life chasing, and only a few attain.
Throughout the day, Sausele works as a pipeline-rehabilitation specialist, touring the nation to restore strains that carry water, chemical compounds, and pure gasoline. However like most die-hard wetsuiters, he treats fishing as his second job, which implies forgoing something approaching a wholesome sleep schedule. Sausele recurrently 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 Might to November. Some junkies log 100 or extra nights a 12 months.
On this extended state of sleep deprivation, wetsuiters should maintain fixed monitor of moon phases, bait migration, wind route, tide swings, present velocity, water temperature, swell and surf circumstances—figuring out {that a} single mistake can spell damage 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 an excellent fisherman, actually good, but additionally as a result of he’s, as he himself places it, one among 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 recurrently as we speak, 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 turn out to be a trip spot for influencers and Wall Road guys, pushing out the working class and making it tougher for fishermen to search 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 retaining Montauk wetsuiters shorebound, it’s the shark inhabitants. Sausele typically 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 massive sharks whereas precariously perched on offshore rocks, most of that are submerged, leaving him belly-deep with predators greater than he’s. In a single video, he releases what seems 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, and so they all the time have been. Spending sleepless evening after sleepless evening as much as your chest within the riotous Atlantic, searching fish the dimensions of a preschooler, isn’t a interest that people who find themselves psychologically grounded pursue. (I don’t exempt myself from this cost.) Many disciples talk about their relationship with the game as a form of dependancy. Various have misplaced marriages and jobs of their determined quest for this fish. Some have misplaced their life.
I went right down to Lengthy Island in June and once more in July—a time of 12 months when shark run-ins are frequent—to swim to the outer rocks with Sausele in an try to know why he dangers life and limb, chasing huge fish solely to launch them, with nothing however the occasional Instagram publish and some hundred likes to point out for it.
Wetsuiters have a mantra: “Boat fish don’t depend.” It’s typically mentioned tongue in cheek, however most of us type 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 car 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 properties which can 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 car parking zone. Though we talked on the telephone a number of instances within the months main as much as my journey, Sausele takes me slightly abruptly. You may anticipate a person who swims by a shark-infested ocean at evening to be brash and filled with swagger. Sausele just isn’t 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 form of “plug” (a synthetic lure). It’s a bit like if Phil Mickelson requested an beginner 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 prefer to prepare in the identical place that he’s fishing in case he’s acknowledged by one other wetsuiter who may attempt to horn in on his chunk. (This sort of secrecy is typical—I’ve my very own related routines and rituals that shade from privateness into paranoia.)
We take our time getting our gear collectively: pool-cue-thick rods and waterproof reels manufactured from aircraft-grade aluminum; plug luggage manufactured from sailcloth hooked up to thick belts manufactured from scuba materials; rust-proof rescue knives; major and backup dive flashlights hooked up to lanyards manufactured from surgical tubing; nitrile-coated gloves; specialised footwear known 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 are able to 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 slightly farther. He retains a well mannered eye on me.
“All proper,” Sausele pronounces. Evening has totally set in, and shortly I’m watching Sausele’s darkish kind side-stroking by 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 varied 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 indicators for me to hitch him. I slip into the black water.
As Sausele promised, the rock is a lot huge however awkwardly formed. The water is effectively above my waist, even once I’m standing on the best half. I’ve fished loads of tough locations—my house waters supply miles of ledge-studded shoreline, craggy demise traps battered by New England tides—however Montauk is a wholly completely different animal. I’m not used to fishing from rocks which can be this deeply submerged, and the surf is frothing and the present tugs at me. Throughout 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. However, your complete 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—may 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 largely 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 seashore, panting calmly, leaning on our surf rods like canes below Montauk’s crumbling bluffs. A sliver of moon is dissolving into the morning. Sausele says he hopes the fishing will probably 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 completely different instances. One evening, I used to be out at nightfall. Complete crowd of surfers. And we see this huge 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! You recognize?” 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 car 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 onerous the day earlier than, assembly at midnight and staying out by dawn with solely two bass and a few hefty bluefish, all launched, for our efforts. After I acquired again to the car parking zone of my beachside motel that morning, vacationers have been already ambling towards the ocean, weighed down by coolers and sandy seashore 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 huge numbers. Sausele hasn’t had a fish bitten in half but this season, however in the course of the top of summer season, it may be a weekly, generally day by 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 price 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 also 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 season months, he let loose a peal of laughter. He mentioned he’s seen a few of Sausele’s Instagram movies. Shipley emphasised that it’s necessary 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 mentioned, it’s really rebounding after many years of decline, because of efficient conservation efforts. However he additionally mentioned that he personally wouldn’t go swimming after darkish, smelling like fish and eels (frequent 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 placement of a submerged rock a brief distance from the one Sausele is already on. I’m uncomfortably conscious of how smooth a human stomach is as I swim. I scramble onto my rock and take a look at—and fail—to not appear to be 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 really 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 a good likelihood I’ll come throughout one among 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 buddies be part of us, swimming out by the incoming tide. They’re among the many very small variety of folks he fishes (and shares info) with. Throughout the glory days of Montauk wetsuiting, when dozens of fishermen recurrently pushed out to the farthest rocks, wetsuiters typically labored in “crews,” cooperating to scout new territory and declare alternative rocks. As Sausele and his buddies 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 may 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 have 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 simply’ll by no means be heat once more. The trudging, flashlight-free walks by the woods or alongside the seashore 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 mustn’t glamorize wetsuiting, and through our hour-long dialog, he jogged my memory many times 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 sincere will let you know that wetsuiting is a sport of appreciable torment. However there’s additionally nothing prefer it. While 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 suddenly, 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 desires to assert you till immediately, as if by magic, you see a tail the dimensions of a brush head spraying water at your toes—in that second, the months of ache are all price it.
The reality is, it’s price it even when the fish aren’t there. They usually aren’t in Montauk, a minimum of this time. Neither are the sharks. None that we see, anyway. We swim off our rocks at 3 a.m. Sausele wants a Pink Bull, one among his buddies 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 among my children wakes her up, I’m fucked,” he says, laughing. Sausele asks if I’m up for regrouping and swimming again out to fish by 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 a protracted drive forward of me. I remind myself that my spouse and son predict me to return in a single piece, and that probably 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 couple of hours.
He understands. His buddies disperse. Sausele provides me a fist bump, and I watch him disappear once more beneath a maze of stars. I take heed to the demise rattle of the Atlantic because it sucks sea-polished stones, and one fisherman, again into its embrace.
By means of the summer season, I proceed to listen to from Sausele that the fishing in Montauk is hard. Anecdotally, it appears powerful in all places. Maine. Massachusetts. Rhode Island. Connecticut. The story is identical. Probably the most gifted wetsuiters I do know report their worst season ever.
So once I return for a 3rd and closing journey to The Finish in late July, my expectations are low. “You’re taking what Montauk provides,” Sausele’s good friend tells me as we’re bullshitting on the shore. “And recently 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 serious about 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’m wondering if that is regular now.
For a minimum of a decade, anglers, conservationists, and fisheries biologists have been warning that the striped-bass inhabitants is in disaster because of a mixture of overfishing and poor spawning years resulting from unusually heat and dry springs and winters. Between business fishing, guided charters, and leisure angling, stripers signify a multibillion-dollar trade, composed of stakeholders who all the time appear to assume that another person is the issue. The leisure fishermen accuse “the comms” of harvesting too many fish. The business fishermen reply by declaring that “the recs” kill greater than their share yearly, and {that a} proportion of launched fish nonetheless die. And on and on.
Within the try to maintain everybody completely satisfied, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Fee has lengthy prevented making the onerous choices—specifically, declaring a moratorium on harvesting striped bass—needed 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 might effectively show the ultimate blow to Montauk’s wetsuiting scene.
Like all city that was as soon as a fishing city and is now that and one thing else, Montauk is a sprawl of contradictions. Prior to now 15 or so years, The Finish has been remodeled right into a summer season 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 season months—because the city’s level of no return. “Our B.C./A.D.,” one mentioned.
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 can be step by step 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 huge homes with good lawns that sit empty 50 weeks out of 52. There are finance boys lined up exterior the Shagwong Tavern, the place they may dance badly to a nasty DJ on the identical flooring the place business fishermen slop beer within the onerous winter.
However for now a minimum of, additionally they stay—the lads who ply the darkish surf, who fish onerous and sleep little and pull an excellent American fish from the ocean and know, as all fishermen know, that there’s a form of love that can also be violence. And whether it is round nightfall and you’re taking the parkway east towards the lighthouse, and also you drive till you possibly can’t drive anymore, you may 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 Pink Bull and gas-station espresso and skim texts from their wives that say “Be secure.” And when the solar units over the Atlantic, a couple 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 Rely.”