Most surfcasting for striped bass is a process: nights spent gliding darters through shifting seams of water, making subtle changes in casting position, lure depth, or retrieve speed; dawns spent methodically working bucktails in the swirling waters off jetty tips; years spent patiently exploring the underwater topography of a boulder field.
Blitzes are events. They are the communions, the bar mitzvahs, the weddings of the autumnal run. They are brash, raucous happenings that bring people together, often with anglers burdened by yearning and gear, running beyond capacity to reach the action while engines mimic them, straining and wheezing before concluding in a screeching stop.
Perhaps only the most hardcore, big bass hunter doesn’t love a blitz—that rare soul who forsakes the joyful congregation of regular anglers. With steely, inhuman focus, he pursues loftier ends—the elusive cow bass that swim quietly, only briefly vulnerable to those who have sacrificed much of their lives to unravel when and where. He knows that blitzes are improbable places for what he seeks, but I always imagine that the cow hunter must bear the pain of inner conflict while walking away from the vast, frenetic abundance that is a striped bass blitz.
Blitzes are bacchanalian orgies of excess—of life, of death, of energy expended, of energy gained. They are a madness of gluttonous avarice, a spectacle of greed. In humans, these traits relate to sloth, imbalance, and bodily and mental harm with dark endings. However, blitzes act like elevated mirrors of our emotional palettes, offering a better version of our passions that yield to an extravagance that is craved and dreamt of.
Blitzes are a suspended moment of limitless opportunity that transcends routine experience, requiring full immersion of the senses, yet are, equally and inevitably, ephemeral … fleeting and haunting, over and over in a surfcaster’s life. Blitzes are a series of events remembered precisely, exact in time and space, yet which become interchangeable, knitting threads of time together as all the walking and casting on lonely, fishless days and nights drop from memory’s net.
For a surfcaster who’s fished decades, there are so many to remember, each subtly different in character, feel, and tone. In an instant, I recall the school of bass and bluefish that raced around the mouth of the Nissequogue River, their doppler effect like an old jalopy engine as it made its way around a racetrack. I recall the frenetic crescendos and decrescendos of striped bass orchestrating a ruthless pinning of peanut bunker to the beach at Breezy Point, the tide gently pulling the clock hands into darkness. I think back on the synchronized leaps of hundreds of flailing adult bunker on Sandy Hook that ignited water and casters, but only after a listless eight hours of waiting. I relive the avian nightmare of flapping gulls enveloping the rocks in Scotts Cove, obscuring the view of casters with bent rods as terrified rain bait took to the air with pursuing striped bass leaping over, bumping into, and sliding by each other in the tens of thousands. These are just a first of many to recall, like top cards drawn from a thick deck.
Any attempt at planning when a blitz might occur is hubris quickly realized. One may see the signs, such as large schools of bait, and while bait always sets the stage, the chain reaction that ignites a blitz follows an unfathomable physics. There’s a mysterious opaqueness to the ocean, tantalizing the imagination with an unseen world existing below. Then, seemingly without reason or warning, a multitude of fins and stripes, predator and prey, are revealed, if ever briefly, into the medium of air within which we see. Nature’s indifference is on full display. It becomes evident that there is no cunning in blitzes, only brutish ritual.
As anglers catch fish after fish, few can believe their luck. After days, sometimes weeks, of stinginess, providence provides an inestimable bounty that gobsmacks any previous fear of lingering bad luck, missed opportunities, or questionable choices. Self-doubt ceases during blitzes and, for reasons I have never quite understood, so does time.
Time eerily suspends in every blitz I’ve encountered. Perhaps it’s the wildly exaggerated success that brings an altered state of elation. Or maybe it’s my total absorption in the moment as an entry into a sense of “flow,” insulated from the wider world, where only casting and catching exist. The flow of blitz seems to enter the bloodstream of the angler, coursing with frantic excitement.
By definition, all blitzes end. A few peter out, but most shock with an incompressible suddenness. Without warning, a great relief settles upon the water as if a hasty pact had been mysteriously ratified by bait and predator. Or, more likely, the parts had, through prolonged fury, become misaligned—the bait too widely scattered, the predators too disorganized and weary to continue. Either way, the minds of casters are ill-suited to the juxtaposition between a delirium of writhing abandonment transformed into an unremarkable, seemingly fishless ocean. What once was is again: the drab surface concealing all.
Smart surfcasters will keep casting, knowing that a large bass or two may lurk behind the blitz. Or perhaps they prefer their hope reduced in increments as each unrequited offering gently lowers them down a slope of disappointment. Eventually, however, even the most naive, the most hopeful, or the most dedicated will pack up and move on.
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