The Hotshot: Lev Wlodyka

“You bring beer? If we can’t catch a derby winner, at least we can catch a buzz.”

Five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in September and the best young striped bass fisherman on Martha’s Vineyard has booze on the brain. This is downtime anywhere else on the planet, but we’re in a tiny fishing village called Menemsha—the center of a universe all its own, a weird old watermen’s enclave at the far reaches of an island cut off from mainland America by a roiling saltwater river—and work is just beginning for Lev Wlodyka. We’re about to head out in his boat to hunt for a giant striped bass, and though beer is not required it comes highly recommended in most quarters of the fishing world. I didn’t bring any, but that’s no problem. We won’t be alone out on the water. Where there are boaters, there are Bud Lights.

It’s the eighth day of the derby, and already a huge striper has been brought to the scale. It’s the sort of fish Lev usually hauls in, the very monster he wanted to get right off the bat, all the better to demoralize the competition and bolster his argument for treating the derby like a job this year: He can jump-start his new charter-fishing business by getting his name in the papers, and while he’s at it he can win some loot, maybe even take home one of the $30,000 grand prizes.

He fell in love with the derby as a kid, and at twenty-eight he’s already won it five times. A year ago, he landed a 57.6-pound bass that ranked among the largest stripers caught on the planet that season, despite the ridiculous name he gave it, “Jelly Belly Nelly.”

If you were scouting for a franchise player to anchor your fantasy fishing team, Lev would be your man.

This time, though, some other fisherman caught the big one: a thirty-two-year-old house painter named Zeb Tilton. The thing had a head the size of a city block, and it tipped the scales at 56.51 pounds to take the lead in the derby’s highest-profile division, striped bass caught from a boat. His striper wasn’t only the largest of this year’s derby. It ranked as the fifth-largest fish caught in any derby going back sixty-two years. Beating it would require a historic feat.

Zeb’s fish broke spirits all over Martha’s Vineyard. Everybody else is telling Lev he can’t beat it. It’s over, it’s over, it’s over: that’s all he’s hearing. It ain’t over, he tells them all. “You’ve got a loser attitude. I’ll catch a bigger one.”

Two weeks later he would prove himself right—and somehow, at the same time, wrong. He’d get a fish that would land on the front pages of the papers, uncover once and for all a secret fishing tactic, thrust islanders into a contentious debate, and throw the derby into turmoil.

Before it was all over Lev couldn’t help but wonder: Would he have been better off just throwing the cursed fish back in the ocean?