“At least 30 jumbo bass weighed in on Sunday morning. There were reports of huge fish finning in the moonlight Saturday night, and all you had to do was lob an eel at them and try to hang on.”
—The Fisherman magazine, Fall 1983
The old days are rarely as good as we remember them. As the decades roll on, the fish grow larger, and the battles become epic as our memories waver like a black-and-white TV signal beamed in through a rabbit ears antenna.
To argue that the best-ever surfcasting for large striped bass took place 40 years ago on Block Island, Rhode Island, might cause some to roll their eyes. But veteran anglers who fished the island’s rocky shores between 1982 and 1987 have never seen anything close to matching it when it comes to big stripers. “The fishing for big fish was phenomenal,” says Dennis Zambrotta, a veteran surfcaster from Newport, Rhode Island, who documented those halcyon years in his book . “But it was by no means automatic. You’d
