Fish of the Derby

Striped Bass

The First Fish of the derby is the mighty striped bass, named for the dark lines down its sides. It is among the most storied of swimmers, the aristocrat of the surf line, a fish that is beloved and worshipped. One reason the bass are pursued with such passion is that, on any given night, a fisherman can haul in something truly enormous. Stripers weighing 50 pounds and up are caught every year. “It is therefore possible,” writer-fishermen John N. Cole and Brad Burns once wrote, “to stand on the beach and toss a short cast to a fish big enough to nearly tear your arms from their sockets.”

Bluefish

Get into a school of blues when you’re using regular fishing line to catch bass, and the blues’ razor-sharp choppers will bite off the hook every other time. Needless to say, fishermen have a complex relationship with the fish. In a letter to an angling friend penned during an 1849 bluefishing trip to the Vineyard, the statesman Daniel Webster expressed the prevailing view, then as now: “It is a common opinion that they destroy or drive off several of the other valuable finny tribes. If this be so, it will be the more patriotic in you and me to take as many of them to the land as we can.”

False Albacore and Bonito

The heroes of the modern derby are the “funny fish”—albies and the bonito. The little tunas are pursued with lighter tackle or with fly rods, and that makes it thrilling when they take off on their long, reel-screaming runs. These are the fights that turnotherwise sensible fishermen into addicts. Guys will wait for hours—days—at jetties, inlets, and other likely feeding spots. They’ll suffer storms, windburn, and relentless boredom for a shot at a five-minute fight.