50 Pound Striper
Jimmy Fee wrote an article in Field & Stream. Striped bass don't often hit a slow-moving needlefish plug very hard but as the gentle July Cape Cod surf swept my needle over the sandbar in front of me into a deeper cut, I could have easily missed the bump that came just before 3 a.m. Luckily I didn't, because it had been made by the bass I'd been hunting for a decade and a half.
Senior Deputy Editor Colin Kearns I don't know exactly when 50 pounds became the mark for striper fishermen. Some anglers trace it back to the 1950s, when Rhode Island–based Ashaway Line Co. offered a reward for stripers of 50 pounds or more caught on its product, and called it the Nifty Fifty Club. But I do know why it became the magic number. Fifty-pounders are rare but not unattainable.
Though I've released almost every striped bass I've ever caught, I planned on having my 50 skin-mounted. A striped bass of that size would be more than 20 years old, and nothing survives that long in the ocean without a damaged fin or tail, a scar on its flank, or a wound from a previous encounter with a hook.
The fish would look fantastic above my mantel—huge mouth agape, gills flared—but as it thrashed in the shallow water, I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't drag that striper onto dry land and let it die. Instead, I unhooked the bass, grabbed its lower jaw, and waded it back into the surf. After almost a minute of my gently rocking it back and forth, it began to kick its tail, slowly at first, then violently as it tried to free itself from my grip. I held on a few seconds longer than I needed to. When I finally let go, the fish hung motionless for a moment, and then, in two powerful beats of its massive broom tail, it disappeared from the beam of my flashlight. The painting of the Third Street jetty in Ocean City, N.J., still hangs over my mantel as a reminder of the first striper I ever caught. And now, directly below it, sits a needlefish with bent and broken hooks—one piercing a quarter-size striper scale—that reminds me of the one I may never catch again.
