Meanwhile, a small camp had been established at Fort Pond Bay by commercial fishermen from the North Fork. In the early 1880s, fishing was poor, and most of them transferred their operations to Rhode Island. Three years later, when the Rhode Island fishery declined, they returned to Montauk, finding the fish “more plentiful than was ever known before.”
Then, at the turn of the century, a William J. Morgan, surfcasting under the Light, landed a seventy-six-pound striped bass that made Montauk famous. Wherever this hero went thereafter, it was said, people would point and say, “That’s Morgan!” But Morgan was no doubt well aware of the 101-pound specimen taken off East Hampton in this period by Nathaniel Dominy’s haul-seine crew. Cap’n Dominy laid the monster out in style in a farm wagon and trundled it around East Hampton and Sag Harbor, charging the villagers ten cents each for a good look before selling it for five dollars to a Sag Harbor hotel; no doubt people draw breath today whose forebears dined on that historic fish. The obsessed Morgan, who tried for the rest of his life to catch one larger, built a house on Montauk overlooking a surfcasting site that was known as “Morgan’s” for decades thereafter.
Within a few years of the arrival of the railroad in 1895—and despite Montauk’s meager population and facilities—the fishing community at Fort Pond Bay became the principal fish shipping port on the East End, with hundreds of tons of black sea bass and other species shipped every day. Tracks were built onto the dock for a special fish train that was loaded directly from the boats. It left Montauk at 4:30 P.M., picked up boxes of fish at the depot platform known as Fanny Bartlett’s, or Napeague Station, as well as at Amagansett and East Hampton, and arrived in the New York markets before daylight.
For years to come there was no paved road across the sands of Napeague,4 and Montauk’s shantytown of fishermen and fish packers remained clustered on the eastern shore of Fort Pond Bay, with four or five pioneer summer cottages on the dunes opposite. Mrs. Agnew’s Tea Room was the only building on the wagon road between the settlement and Montauk Light. The fishing community, notably the Parsons, Edwards, and Hulse families from Amagansett and the large Tuthill clan from Orient and East Marion on the North Fork, in addition to some people from Connecticut, would usually arrive in early May and go home in fall; most of them lived in simple shacks constructed from “fish box boards”—the big sugar boxes, made from sugar pine, that would carry ten bushels of skimmers or six hundred pounds of fish. Since Fort Pond Bay was relatively unprotected, the fishing boats were moored to spiles, or stakes, offshore that were limber enough to bend with the strong winds. The Parsonses and Tuthills ran their own boats and kept their own fish houses on the east shore of the bay; the fishing company on the south shore belonged to J. C. Wells.
The Edwards Brothers, running ocean traps off Amagansett, unloaded their catch at the Tuthill dock. In early April, four to ten ocean traps, or barrel traps—a leader or wing turned fish offshore into a series of funnels and pens—were set up to a mile offshore in about seven fathoms of water, to catch whatever came along in the strong spring run. The ocean trap was similar in design to a large pound trap but used anchors instead of stakes. A crew of forty, in four seine boats, was required to lift these traps, from which twelve tons or more of edible fish might be harvested each day. When the ocean traps were taken up, about June 1, the crews were switched to the big bunker steamers, which sailed from the Edwards Brothers docks near the menhaden factories (called Bunker City) now concentrated in the vicinity of Promised Land, west of Napeague Harbor. In the twenties, the Tuthills and Jake Wells hired summer help from Nova Scotia to work in the packing houses and on the docks, and some of these men moved down to Promised Land to crew on the Edwards Brothers boats. A Montauk colony of Nova Scotia families—including such fishing clans as the Pittses and Beckwiths—are part of the Montauk community to this day.
Most of the early Montauk fishermen were trappers, and the Tuthills lifted their fish pounds, or traps, on Gardiners Island as well as in the environs of Fort Pond Bay. On a map made early in the century, nearly three hundred traps are shown between North Bar at Montauk Point and Eastern Plains Point on Gardiners Island, a far denser concentration than exists today.5 Captain Nat Edwards, son of Cap’n Gabe, ran a dozen pound traps between Shagwong Point and Water Fence; Captain Sam Edwards and other fishermen ran small low-powered draggers, thirty to thirty-five feet long, or set lobster pots, or hand-lined for pollock, sea bass, and bluefish.
Throughout the Hamptons, small scallop boats and other craft had been catering to summer fishing parties since the turn of the century. Montauk draggermen did well with swordfish (by August 7 in the summer of 1925, Captain George Beckwith had harpooned thirty-seven) and in the late twenties and early thirties, when Montauk was developed as a resort, many draggers joined the early charter fleet. In 1927 the first swordfish ever taken on rod and reel was brought into Fort Pond Bay by one of the Florida fishing guides drawn to the area. The following year the former Great Pond, rechristened Lake Montauk, was permanently opened to the bay, creating an all-weather harbor.
In the mid-twenties, when agitation to restrict the activities of commercial men had already started, a federal hatchery for production of lobster, codfish, flounder, and pollock was proposed for Fort Pond Bay, and a freezing plant designed to market prepacked fish was already under construction. But these enterprises were abandoned with the opening and development of Great Pond. Although certain old-timers stuck to Fort Pond Bay for another twenty years, the construction of additional docks, and the protected anchorage, had drawn most of the fleet to the new harbor. The Napeague road was long since paved, and the fish train was now replaced by truckers. Commercial men such as Gus and Fred Pitts (of the Nova Scotia colony), draggermen Dan Grimshaw and Harry Conklin (who took out President Herbert Hoover), and the Beckwith, Erickson, and Tuma brothers soon adapted their work boats for chartering; even Captains Sam and Bert Edwards, and later Sam’s sons Kenneth and Dick, took time off from bunkering to join the fleet. Before long, big bottom-fishing boats were developed that would attract thousands of people to Montauk every year. More than five thousand customers were recorded in 1932, and this number tripled the following year and doubled again in 1934, when the Long Island Rail Road established daily excursion trains from New York and Brooklyn. S. Kip Farrington of East Hampton (ignoring the surfmen) described the pioneer fish guides of the thirties as the rightful heirs of Captain Josh Edwards and the shore whalers; as a big game fisherman and sport-fishing writer, he did more to advertise the new craze for deep-sea fishing than anyone else before or since. By the mid-thirties, special deep-sea fishing boats with twin screw engines and flying bridges had been designed for working the Gulf Stream, sometimes as far as seventy miles offshore; the fish prized most were swordfish, marlin, and the giant bluefin tuna, moving north and south from its summer grounds off Wedgeport, Nova Scotia.
The 1938 hurricane created the Shinnecock Inlet, now a fishing station, but it mostly destroyed the Montauk fishing village at Fort Pond Bay. The railroad depot is still there, however, and so is the fish company founded by E. D. Tuthill and owned today by Perry Duryea, Jr., whose father married Captain Ed Tuthill’s daughter. The hundreds of boats that once littered the bay are now in Montauk Harbor, which by the time of my arrival in the early fifties was already home port for one of the largest sport-fishing fleets on the East Coast.
That summer of 1954, the charter season was well under way when the Merlin arrived. There was one slip left at the town dock, right across from one of the pioneer charter men, John Messbauer, and we soon found out why nobody had wanted it; the current was strong and the approach narrow, and the one way to back a single-engine boat into this berth was a sequence of swirling maneuvers at full throttle. Unless executed with precision, these maneuvers would strand the boat across the bows of neighboring boats, held fast by the current, while the customers wondered how their lives had been consigned to such lubberly hands. Before I got the hang of it, there was more tha
n one humiliating episode, not helped by the embarrassment of my trusty mate, who would shrug, wince, and roll his eyes, pretending to the old salts along the dock that if only this greenhorn would let him take the helm, he could do much better.
At thirty-two feet, the Merlin was small by Montauk standards, and she lacked the customary flying bridge, not to mention upholstered fighting chairs, teak decks, and chrome. We had no old customers to depend on, and no big shiny cockpit to attract new ones, and Captain Al Ceslow on the Skip II, for whom John had worked as mate the previous summer, was the only man in the whole fleet of forty-five-odd boats who would offer advice or help of any kind. However, it was soon July, and fish and fishing parties both abounded (and were biting hard, said cynical Jimmy Reutershan, who was bluefishing out of Montauk in his Jersey skiff, and who believed strongly in lunar tide tables as a guide to the feeding habits of fish and man; he had noticed, he said, that Homo sapiens, wandering the docks with a glazed countenance, would suddenly stir into feeding frenzy, signing up boats with the same ferocity—and at the same stage of the tide—that Pomatomus saltatrix would strike into the lures around the Point).
And so, from the first, the Merlin did pretty well. We made up in eagerness and love of fishing what we lacked in experience of our new trade, we worked hard to find fish for our clients, and except on weekends, when we ran two six-hour trips each day, we sailed overtime without extra charge whenever the morning had been unproductive.Also, unlike many of the charter men, who seemed to feel that anglers of other races belonged on “barf barges”—the party or bottom-fishing boats—we welcomed anyone who came along. One day we sailed a party of Chinese laundrymen from up-Island, each one equipped with a full-sized galvanized garbage can. Their one recognizable utterance was “Babylon.” Conveying to us through their Irish-American interpreter that trolling for hard-fighting and abundant bluefish did not interest them, they said that they wished to be taken to the three coal barges sunk southwest of the Point in a nor’easter, a well-known haunt of the black sea bass so highly esteemed in Chinese cookery. Once the hulks were located, they set out garbage cans along the cockpit and pin-hooked sea bass with such skill (to cries of “Bobby-Ion!”) that every man topped off his garbage can. The half ton of sea bass that they took home more than paid the cost of the whole charter, while gladdening every Oriental heart in western Suffolk.
Another day, three Shinnecock Indian chiefs in quest of “giants” (they were soon off to Alaska, they declared, to shoot giant brown bear) took us all the way to Rosie’s Hole off the coast of Rhode Island in vain pursuit of giant bluefin. Because of the fuel, the barrel of bunker chum bought at Ted’s freezer, and the installation of the Merlin’s heavy tuna chair, the trip was expensive even for car dealers from Washington, D.C., where the three chiefs spent most of the year, passing themselves off as black men. The chiefs liked us because the other boats had refused their trade, and we liked them because they spent their money cheerfully, though they saw neither hide nor hair of giants.
No other boat got a bluefin that day either, and John and I were relieved as well as disappointed; in theory, we knew what to do once the huge fish took the mackerel bait that we drifted down the current (crank up the engine, cast off the buoy on the anchor, and chase after the exhilarated fish before it stripped the last line off the reel), but being inexperienced with giant tuna, we foresaw all sorts of possibilities for dangerous error. Big bluefin may be ten feet long, and nearly a half ton in weight, and the speed and power of these fish are awesome. (In the Merlin’s former life in Ipswich Bay, a passenger had come too close to the blur of green line leaving the tub after a horse mackerel had been harpooned. The line whipped around his leg and snapped him overboard and down thirty feet under the sea before someone grabbed a hatchet and whacked the line where it sizzled across the brass strip on the combing. Had that hatchet not been handy, and wits quick, the nosy passenger would have lost his life.)
Toward the end of the homeward journey across Block Island Sound, I encouraged the chiefs to stop on Shagwong Reef and pick up a few bluefish to take home for supper. The thwarted giant-killers had consoled themselves with gin on the long voyage, and one man agreed to fish for blues if we would strap him into the big fighting chair and give him that thick tuna rod to work with, so that he could imagine what it must be like to deal masterfully with one of those monsters back at Rosie’s Hole. When the strike came, it failed to bend even the rod tip, but the angler, cheered on by his friends, set the hook with a mighty backward heave into the fighting chair. “It’s charging the boat!” his assistants yelled as something broke the surface; the only porgy in the Merlin’s history that ever went for a trolled bluefish lure had been snapped clear out of the water by that heave and skimmed through the air over the wake in a graceful flight that a flying fish might well have envied.
So much did all three chiefs enjoy this exciting fishing experience that they felt obliged to lie down in the cockpit, collapsed with laughter. “No mo’ bluefishin,” they cried helplessly, waving us on. “Giant pogie’s good enough!” Once ashore, they gave both of us giant tips, thanked us as “scholars and gentlemen” for a splendid outing, and went off merrily down the dock with their souvenir porgy. Next time they visited these parts, they said, they would bring their girlfriends down to meet us (which they did).
Not all our clients were such good sports as the three chiefs. A charter demands six hours at close quarters with company that is rarely of one’s choice, and often there are two charters each day. While most of our people were cooperative and pleasant, others felt that their money entitled them to treat captain and mate as servants, and one ugly customer advised me even before the Merlin cleared the breakwater that he knew all about the charter men’s tricks and cheating ways. I turned the boat around, intending to put him on the dock, but his upset friends made him apologize.
Another day the motor broke down on Shagwong Reef in clear, rough weather of a northwest wind. A cockpit full of queasy passengers wanted to know why I did not call the Coast Guard. The truth was that their captain, having had no time to go to New York and apply to the Coast Guard for a captain’s license, was running a renegade boat, and was stalling for time until Al Ceslow on the Skip II could finish his morning charter and tow us in. One of the men, under the horrified gaze of his newlywed wife, actually panicked, shrieking at the other passengers that the captain’s plan was to put this death craft on the rocks; I had to grab him by the shirtfront and bang him up against the cabinside to calm him down. (On another charter boat one morning—we could hear the shouts and crashing right over the radiotelephone—a disgruntled client had to be slugged into submission, with the skipper bellowing for police assistance at the dock.)
The Merlin was plagued by persistent hazing from two charter boats that now and then would turn across our wake, out on the Elbow, and cut off all four of our wire lines; no doubt other new boats were welcomed in this way as well. Wire line, lures, and leaders are expensive, and because wire line is balky stuff, it often took most of an hour of good fishing tide to re-rig the lines for the unhappy customers. The two big captains of these big boats (both of them sons of earlier big captains who now ran big enterprises on the docks) were successful charter men who had nothing to fear from the small Merlin; often this pair trolled side by side, chatting on radio-telephones from their flying bridges. One day off Great Eastern Rock,6 heart pounding with mixed fear and glee, and deaf to all oaths and shouts of warning, I spun my wheel and cut across both of their fat sterns, taking all eight of their wire lines at a single blow.
In the long stunned silence on all three boats, John Cole said quietly, “Oh boy,” and suggested a long detour to Connecticut. “Those guys are going to be waiting for us on the dock,” he said, “and they are BIG.” But there was no reception party, and our lines were never cut again. Not long thereafter one of these skippers called the Merlin on “the blower,” passing terse word in the charter man’s way that he was into fish: “See where we a
re, Cap, down to the east’rd? Better come this way.”
One day on the ocean side, working in close to the rocks west of the Light, we picked up a striped bass on the inshore line and a bluefish on the outside; we did this on three straight passes, and probably could have done it again if we had not been late for our afternoon charter and had to head in. So far as we knew, those three bass, and three more the next day from the same place, were the only stripers taken out of Montauk for nearly a fortnight in the bass dog days of late July. From that day on, we had to wait to fish this spot until the fleet went in at noon, because other boats began to tail us with binoculars, in the same way that the Merlin sometimes tailed Gus Pitts when the Marie II worked the striper holes along the beach, watching his mate strip out the wire to guess the depth at which Cap’n Gus was trolling, or glimpse what lure he was rigging to his rods.
On days when we had no charter, we went out hand-lining for blues, heading west past Culloden Point7 and Fort Pond Bay to Water Fence, at the western boundary of the land acquired by the Proprietors of Montauk, where the cattle fence that once kept East Hampton’s livestock on the Montauk pastures during the summer had extended out into the water; past the walking dunes, a sand flow at the old forest edge on the north side of Hither Hills; past Goff Point and the fallen chimney of the abandoned bunker factory at Hicks Island.8 East of Cartwright Shoal, the shallow waters teemed with small three-pound “tailor” bluefish that bit as fast as the hand lines were tossed overboard, and brought a good price on the market.9
The Merlin was no longer a renegade boat (I got my license in late summer), and no one ignored her radio queries or disdained to call her; she had already built up a list of clients who wished to charter her again the following year. The bluefishing was strong and steady, and offshore the school tuna were so thick that by leaving one fish on the line while boating the other three, we could keep all four lines loaded almost continually until the box had overflowed. On some days, poor John, skidding around on the bloody deck, exhausted from pumping the strong tuna off the bottom for the weary customers, would send me wild-eyed signals to get the boat away from the goddamn fish, maybe show the clients a nice shark or ocean sunfish.