A Certain Stripe: Casting a Line for Striped Bass

Photography by Jeremy Garretson

The human urge to catch something wild is strong. Every year for the past 30, that impulse caused Bill Wetzel, a social worker and legendary Montauk fishing guide, to live in anticipation of the first moon in June, when the sand eels, which striped bass love to eat, come out in the Peconic bays and begin to move east. “They start out on the north side, and by the next moon they come around the south side.” 

That’s when Wetzel gets a lot more focused. For the next six months, he’s all about catching stripers in the surf at Montauk.

Casting into the surf

Wetzel’s family moved to Long Island from Sandusky, Ohio, when he was 13, and he pivoted from fishing for walleye and catfish in Lake Michigan to surfcasting in Oyster Bay. “I can’t remember not fishing,” he says. “The allure for me is the dynamic of the surf, going out in a storm with rain so hard it feels like needles on your skin. Pushing yourself, pushing your body. Getting up at all hours … Sometimes you walk a mile over boulders.”

Wetzel is not alone in his pursuit of striped bass, which are so popular with recreational fishers in New York waters that the annual catch of striped bass by commercial fishermen is dwarfed by the recreational catch. Fishing boat charters and surf-fishing excursions, tackle and bait as well as hotel and restaurant businesses on the East End are fueled in part by visiting fishermen seeking to catch striped bass. 

Stripers are different from bluefish, another popular local sport fish, and learning their habits and feeding preferences is part of the allure. “They don’t just show up like bluefish. Stripers are more likely to stage up at night,” says Wetzel. “Striped bass are beautiful. The ones caught on sand beaches are lighter color, in the rocks they are darker.” Some fishers say that where striped bass are smart and finicky, bluefish are just angry.

Wetzel began taking clients out with him on fishing charters in 1996. His dance card starts to fill with repeat customers when he opens his book in December, and his website is a lively, members-only repository of fishing reports, techniques and the eternal topic of which lures to use and when. An annual fishing tournament Wetzel organizes every June through his website, Surf Rats Ball, has raised more than $100,000 over 18 years to benefit Kids Need MoRE, a nonprofit that enhances the lives of children facing cancer and their families.

One of Wetzel’s former students is Tim Regan, who works in the summer at the Bridgehampton Tennis and Surf Club and as a residential property manager in the winter. He’s also a lifelong fisherman, who loves the challenge of fishing for striped bass in the surf and over the years has had to work hard to fit his fishing into some vestige of a normal life. “The guys who catch the bigger ones are not living a normal life. I used to do that,” he says. “I had a couple of girlfriends I could not hold onto because I was going out every night to fish.”

Nowadays, Regan mainly fishes when it’s light out and his wife of two years often joins him on the beach after work. “She swears that she enjoys being on the beach and watching me fish.” 

Regan says part of what makes striper fishing so all-consuming is its complexity. 

“Surfcasting is difficult and there’s a lot of lore and mythology about striped bass. People anthropomorphize them, attributing them intelligence that they probably don’t have,” Regan says. “The faster the current flows, the more willing they are to bite. They’re hard to hook, and people say that the striper will swim right over to a rock and rub the line off.”

Casting from a boat

Some people live to catch stripers, and some prefer to eat them. Savio Mizzi runs a charter fishing business out of Montauk that takes groups of anglers out for half-day and full-day trips, which target striped bass. About half of his customers are fishing for dinner; the other half fish for the challenge of landing stripers. Because the rules say recreational fishers may only take one fish of a very specific size every day, those who fish, whether in the surf or on a boat, end up releasing most of the fish they catch.

Mizzi has been running charters out of Montauk for 35 years. He grew up in Malta, fished all his life, and moved to the Hamptons in 1989 to work as an artist and illustrator. After a few years, fishing won out and he started running a 23-foot charter boat taking people out for stripers using light tackle to enhance the experience. “It’s not about catching fish, it’s about how you catch the fish: to catch the biggest fish with the smallest lure, the lightest pole and bring in a bass of 50 pounds. That’s my idea of fishing. Wire line, live bait, that’s not my thing,” he says. “I’ll fish all day, catch and release.”

Striped bass fishing means business

In 2000, Ken Morse opened Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor, and recently expanded to a larger store at 260 Hampton Road in Southampton. Morse has had as much one-on-one interaction with seekers of stripers as anyone, especially those who have just been hooked by the lure of fishing and want the equipment to get them started.

Morse goes back long enough to remember the year a moratorium on catching striped bass was called in 1984. The one-year ban on taking stripers was due to natural population fluctuations and overfishing and it worked. In that year, although it was legal to fish for striped bass, it was not okay to keep them, and the striped bass population rebounded and stayed strong for years. More recently, striped bass has been under pressure again, and the rules have tightened. Starting April 15 through Dec. 15, 2024, New York recreational fishers may keep one fish between 28 and 31 inches long per day.

Commercial fishers work under a system that allocates a limited number of permits to fishermen, along with size limits that allow them to take stripers that measure between 26 and 38 inches. Sawyer Clark, a commercial fisher who works the waters around Shelter Island, sells to seafood markets and farmer’s markets, but like all commercial fishermen, he can only keep a few of the stripers he finds in his pound nets (a type of fish trap once used by indigenous people) due to the restrictions on size and number of fish, so he makes a living catching everything else.

Morse says the regulations don’t really affect the business of striped bass fishing on the East End. “We’re all practicing catch and release anyway,” he says. “There’s a lot of fishermen here. I even have customers that find striped bass rather overrated.” Morse, who counts himself as both a fisher and an eater of stripers, likes to make ceviche with his catch, especially in the summer.

Some like ’em hot

There’s nothing quite like the taste and mouthfeel of a well-cooked striped bass fillet. Meaty and full of flavor yet light and flaky with no oiliness, it’s a dream to cook whether grilled, baked or steamed. At the much-missed and newly reopened Meeting House in Amagansett, Tim Bando is back in the kitchen and striped bass is the go-to special on his locally sourced menu. Bando prefers a light touch with this mighty fish, pan-cooked hot and fast.

Charlie Manwaring buys stripers for his store, Southold Fish Market, from his network of commercial fishers on the East End and saves some for himself because it’s his favorite eating fish. “I do a tequila glaze,” he says. “Sauté shallots and garlic. When shallots are translucent, add capers and then the tequila.” He’s partial to Patron or Dos Amigos, but once it’s reduced to syrupy glaze, fine distinctions, and most of the alcohol, are moot. “It’s a hearty fish and that’s why I like it.”

As it is for all wild-caught seafood, the future for striped bass is cloudy. Warming waters change and limit their food sources. Clumsy handling by fishers who take them out of the water for a photo session or allow them to flop on a sandy beach before releasing them contribute to a high catch-and-release mortality rate. But when they are plentiful, and responsibly caught, the sea holds no greater gift. Mizzi says a good day on his boat is one where he loses count of how many fish are caught and released. “I had a client the other day catch 80 fish, a few bluefish, mainly stripers. It’s a gorgeous fish.”