First Light by William G. Tapply, Philip R. Craig Page A

semi-silhouette against the pink western horizon. She cast her plug amazing distances with the effortless grace of a world-class athlete, and just about the time I got a fly tied onto my leader, I heard her shout.
    I looked up. Her rod was bent and something was splashing in the water in front of her. She was hauling back, then dropping her rod as she reeled up, all the while backing up the beach.
    I put my rod into the Jeep and jogged down to the water. “What’ve you got?” I said.
    â€œOh, just a bass,” she said. “Not a keeper. I thought at first it might’ve been a blue.”
    Both J.W. and Zee preferred bluefish to stripers, mainly because there are no size restrictions on blues, while most of the bass you’re likely to catch run smaller than the thirty-two-inch legal minimum. Small bluefish won’t win any Derby prizes, but they can be killed and brought home and eaten. Like mostVineyard natives I know, the Jacksons think of fish as food, and they like to live off the land and the sea.
    I, on the other hand, grew up fishing for trout with a fly rod, and I think of fish as a source of entertainment and sport.
    I’m not sure how the fish feel about it.
    Zee had herself a fine striped bass. It looked to be just a few inches shy of thirty-two. She dragged it up onto the wet sand, then knelt beside it to back the hook out of its mouth.
    She held it upright in the shallow water to revive it. After a minute, it flapped its big tail, drenching Zee, and swam away. Zee laughed, then stood up and wiped the spray off her face. “Well, they’re here,” she said. “I had a couple other hits. You better get casting. You never know how long it’s gonna last.”
    I jogged to the Jeep for my rod. When I started back for the beach, I noticed that several of the other fishermen had edged closer to Zee so that they were all throwing their lures out into the same general vicinity. She didn’t seem to mind. I’d seen this before—the communal attitude of the surf casters. We fly fishermen are more secretive and antisocial and possessive of our hot spots. We resent being crowded. Surf casters seem to welcome it.
    I’m not sure what to make of this, but it’s tempting to observe that there are two kinds of people in this world: surf casters and fly fishermen.
    Of course, there really
are
two kinds of people: those who think there are just two kinds of people, and those who understand that there are many more than that.
    Anyway, being a fly fisherman, I walked for about a hundred yards down the beach along the Gut until I’d put plenty of space between me and the last fisherman in line, and then I started casting a big white Lefty’s Deceiver out into the water. A little current had started running into the pond, so I cast a bit to my right and let the fly sink and swing past before I began to twitch it in.
    I soon got into the rhythm of it—throw it out there, swing it around, strip it back, take two steps to my left, throw it out again. Time becomes fluid and irrelevant out on a quiet beach in the evening twilight, and I may have been casting for an hour, or maybe only for ten minutes, when my fly stopped halfway through a swing. It just stopped, as if it had snagged a piece of sunken wreckage. I instinctively pulled straight back on my line, and I felt the hook bite into something. I raised my rod. It was on something solid, and whatever it was didn’t move.
    A rock, I thought.
    Then it exploded, yanking my rod down and ripping the line out of my fingers.
    Then it was gone.
    I stripped in my line and saw what I expected to see. My fly had been bitten off.
    A bluefish.
    A big, razor-toothed bluefish.
    Small bluefish slash and crash at bait—and flies— but big bluefish sometimes just chomp down and hold on, the way stripers do. That’s what this one had done.
    Damn. A really big bluefish. Gone.
    Without a foot of wire at the end of