Last-ditch Hail Mary trip for winter stripers | Quest for No. 1: Part IV
This fishing pier offered epic views of Manhattan, but no striped bass.
It all came down to this. After a month of disappointments mixed with missed opportunities, I had one last shot to catch my January fish and, by doing so, extend my monthly fish streak to 11, one short of the 12-month goal I’d set for myself.
It was January 30th, and with the day off and the temps sticking above freezing, I had crafted a two-part Hail Mary plan to quiet my early-month regrets and secure a fish. One fish was all I needed. One single scaly catch to accomplish my meaningless internal goal.
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I’d be hitting both the sweet and the salt, hoping to find at least one fish to take my lure and stick around for a picture. First, I’d head to The Park, then to the East River for a chance at a truly unlikely late-January striper.
I was already feeling good as I walked into The Park, noting the shimmering surface of the lake, not a single shard of ice in view. From past experience, I felt like that was all I needed to find a few bluegill, black crappie or largemouth hiding in deep cover amid tangled branches.
No ice in The Park, but no fish either.
But as the cast count started to climb, and my hands started to freeze, I still couldn’t claim a single bite.
I was getting antsy, so after an hour-and-a-half of fruitless attempts, I ditched and started heading West to the river. In between I stopped at F&F Pizzeria, my choice for the best pizza in the world, to get a pie to bring home for dinner.
Somehow in the five minutes it took for me to park without paying the meter, pick up my pie and walk back to the car, I’d received a familiar bright orange parking ticket on my windshield.
A bad omen indeed.
I parked near as I could to the East River, then walked the last few blocks to a conveniently-located fishing pier. Despite being in New York for almost 20 years, and regularly plying the waters for striped bass, I’d never actually taken a cast in the East River, which isn’t even a river at all, but a tidal strait connecting the Long Island Sound to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s as if someone plopped Long Island down off the shore of New York, and the East River is the slither of water separating it from Manhattan.
Recent On The Water reports claimed people were having good luck catching holdover stripers in the East River all through January, a bucktail or soft plastic and an outgoing tide was allegedly all that was needed. This had me foolishly thinking that I could actually make it happen.
Walking onto the pier, the first thing I noticed was the water was chocolate-milk brown, a result of heavy rains a few days before. Not a good sign. Not to be dissuaded, I walked past the only other angler around, a guy with four baited lines in the water, and started casting.
But nothing would be caught, except a few minutes of lazy conversation with some passing dog-walkers. After more than an hour had passed, and with pizza waiting in the car, my confidence was shot, and I decided to pack it in and officially surrender.
As I walked off the pier deflated, I spotted a sign that I’d never noticed in that spot before, right at the start of the pier, though a type of sign I’ve unfortunately seen many times. It turns out exactly where I’d been fishing was a Combined Sewage Outlfall point.
It was a stark reminder that despite all of the process we’ve made cleaning up our waterways since the passage of the Clean Water Act in the 70s, raw sewage still poured into rivers and oceans during heavy rain events in cities across the country. In New York City, there are some 700 such spots.
It’s no secret how to fix this problem. All that’s needed are giant holding tanks underground to capture flood waters and slowly release them back into the sewage treatment system over time. They did recently it in the Seine in Paris, where Olympians will swim the waters in competition this summer. They’re doing it in one town in New Jersey, just across the Hudson. Money and political will are lacking, and that plays a huge role in this ongoing environmental crisis. But awareness is also lacking, as well as the wrongheaded, decades-long imprint on New Yorkers brains that the waters surrounding the city are toxic and beyond repair. As anyone who fishes or works to protect these waters can tell you, that’s utter nonsense. We’ve made huge progress, with massive schools of bait, whales, dolphins, bluefin tuna and sharks hunting hunting these waters as they once did long ago, what is just a taste of the natural abundance that marked New York for millennia. But much more can and must be done.
But none of that knowledge save my monthly fishing streak from an unceremonious January end.
SONG OF THE TRIP
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