By Steve Grant

We were bouncing down the beach in a big four-wheel-drive pickup, going fishing, when Cooper Gilkes, one of the most respected guides on Martha’s Vineyard, stopped to talk to a ranger.

“You should have been here this morning,” the ranger said. “Six o’clock this morning, it was unbelievable.” That is, there were striped bass everywhere. Now, it appeared, they were somewhere else.

“Don’t tell me that,” Gilkes said. “I don’t want to hear that.” I was riding shotgun. I didn’t want to hear it either.

I had come to Martha’s Vineyard for one reason: to catch a striped bass on a fly rod.

It was early May, after a winter that wouldn’t go away. The migratory striped bass and bluefish showed up off the Vineyard more than a week late, and even now were only trickling in. Fishing was agonizingly slow, at the very time of year when anyone who even occasionally wets a line has the itch to be on the water.

Before I even arrived, Gilkes warned me that he couldn’t promise fish before late May but would do his best. I said I’d take my chances; given a choice of fishing or not fishing, you fish.

You can fish for striped bass on Martha’s Vineyard with spinning tackle and have loads of fun, of course. But I’m a fly-rodder. And over the past two decades, saltwater fly-fishing has grown like the fish in the proverbial fish story. The Vineyard, with miles of beach access and numerous salt ponds fed by the sea, is first-class fly-fishing water.

Until recently, Karen Kukolich’s 14-pound, 3-ounce striped bass was the women’s world record for a striper caught on a 12-pound-test leader. She’s fished all over the world, holds five other women’s division fly-rodding records and considers the Vineyard, where she lives, a special place to fish.

A summertime playground for movie stars, rock stars and financial tycoons, the Vineyard is, at the same time, one of the great American saltwater fly-fishing destinations. People come from throughout the U. S. and abroad just to fish, and the celebrities are often among them.

In fact, an entire fishy subculture permeates the Vineyard, a decidedly upscale resort destination with high-end restaurants, galleries and boutiques galore. Walk into PJ’s Cafe & Catering, a none-too-fancy, mostly take-out restaurant popular with the locals, and on the wall is a signed art print of a striped bass hitting a fly. Think of it as fine art and Formica, as if the striper were the whole point of Vineyard existence. There are striped bass weathervanes, striped bass boxer shorts, stripers at suppertime, stripers all the time.

I’ve fly-fished in freshwater for trout for years but had never lobbed a fly in saltwater. I couldn’t wait; in recent years, three different people on three different occasions used the same word to describe saltwater fly-fishing to me: addictive.

Small stripers run 15 to 20 inches and might weigh a few pounds. But stripers can run much larger, with fish of 10 or 15 pounds fairly common and fish to 40 or more pounds taken. I’m a guy who will happily spend a good part of a day walking up a mountain brook catching and releasing little brook trout that don’t weigh more than a breakfast sausage. Ten-pound stripers on flies? Where’s my camera?

But again, it was early in the season, and I knew I had to be content — thrilled, really — with a fish of 18 inches. The prime Vineyard fishing really takes off in late May and runs into the fall. I was a week early.

Meanwhile, a big nor’easter that caused much flooding in New England had literally torn an opening in the barrier beach that connected Edgartown and Chappaquiddick, creating tricky new currents, not to mention inconvenience for the people who used to drive to and from Chappaquiddick along the beach. Stripers already were congregating at the breach now and then, even this early in the season.

Success At Sunset

Guides often leave the fishing to their clients, but I urged Gilkes — he is known as Coop — to fish with me. We rigged up our rods and began casting, though I had the sense Coop’s fishing was all business. He was trying to find a pod of fish that he would direct me to. We fished for an hour without so much as a hit.

“Let’s go,” he said. Clearly the stripers were not there. Off we went to fish Edgartown Great Pond, a salt pond that holds stripers and other species. This, I sensed, was one of Coop’s little secrets, one of those places where even a neophyte saltwater fly-rodder had a decent chance of hooking one. We drove down a long, winding dirt road, parked in a clearing no bigger than his truck and started walking.

Reaching a narrow section of a cove, we waded in. It was 6 p.m., and the sun was dipping in the sky, but still bright. It might as well have been a ticking clock as far as I was concerned. Sure I could fish again tomorrow; I had another day on the Vineyard. But Coop was leaving for the mainland, and I’d be fishing by myself. I knew the odds of my getting a fish would drop substantially. I’ve learned over the years that a guide can make all the difference when fishing a new place.

The best fishing would come just as the sun was about to set, Coop said. Noted.

Wham. The sun hadn’t set, but he had a fish on and landed a striper of about 18 inches. Where there is one striper there often are others. I cast repeatedly nearby — Coop insisted I do so — and, son of a gun, caught and released my first striper, a fish of about 15 inches. Small, to be sure — tiny, really, as stripers go, but it was my first fish on a fly in saltwater. We took a picture. If I did not catch another fish it would be OK. I got one. I got one on a fly. Got it on a chartreuse Clouser pattern.

Gilkes caught another. I caught another, maybe 18 inches. Then it got quiet. Time to move.

We walked the shoreline of the salt pond, annoying a pair of osprey that squealed overhead, as they do. Surely a nesting pair, I thought, and a good sign. The osprey, or fish hawk, is a big-time fish-eater. This pond had to be really fishy, or they wouldn’t be there.

Around a bend and into another cove we walked. This was often a good spot, Coop said, and one where you could wade out 30 or so feet to cast. Over the next hour, we caught and released a half-dozen or more small stripers and white perch. You know the fishing is good when you aren’t sure how many you’ve caught, and I lost count.

The sky by now was a mix of horizontal stripes of salmon and deep pink, with little strips of yellow, amid dark blue, the night air cool but not cold.

I’m fussy about my fishing; to me, there can be no great fishing without great scenery, and by great scenery I mean a sense of the pristine natural world. There’s room for mankind’s creations in my fishing, but not much. I’ll leave it to others to catch big fish in the warm outflow of a nuclear power plant.

Anyway, here I was, with a beautiful sky in a quiet, woodsy nook of the Vineyard, lots of those wind-stunted Cape Cod oaks and pines surrounding the pond and not much else to intrude. Yes, this met with my approval.

We’d agreed to quit about 8, and it was close to 8. I cast again, by this time getting used to the saltwater fly rod — these salt rods have a lot more heft than my trout rods. I was getting a little more distance with the fly.

Another hit, and a strong one, bent my rod like a rainbow. The fish took off on a run, stripping line from the reel. Another run. Then another. “This is a decent fish,” I said. Coop watched, ready. In all, there were at least five runs until, after something close to 10 minutes, the fish tired, and Coop was able to grab it.

“A keeper,” he said before it was even out of the water. He lifted it and weighed it on the spot. It was 11 pounds, 29 inches long, and the biggest fish I’d ever caught on a fly.

The sun had just set, and it was getting dark.

By Steve Grant

EDGARTOWN, Ma. – We were bouncing down the beach in a big four-wheel-drive pickup, going fishing, when Cooper Gilkes, one of the most respected guides on Martha’s Vineyard, stopped to talk to a ranger.

“You should have been here this morning,” the ranger said. “Six o’clock this morning, it was unbelievable.” That is, there were striped bass everywhere. Now, it appeared, they were somewhere else. (more…)

By Steve Grant

CUTLER, Me. – As I was about to pull the car into a small dirt parking lot, a yearling moose appeared at roadside, ambled into the deep spruce forest in front of us and disappeared. 
   This was going to be good. 
   My daughter, Allison, and I parked, strapped on our packs and, within a half-hour on a cool, windy morning in late spring, began hiking the Bold Coast Trail, a trail that is about as northeast as you can get in the Northeastern United States. 
   If the quintessential knock-your-wool-socks-off scenic trail is supposed to be a mountain path in the Rockies or Appalachians, the Bold Coast Trail, we quickly discovered, is doing its part to displace that image with one of seacoast and spruce. 
   There are no big mountains in Cutler, only some hills, but there are thousands of acres of shaggy spruce and fir forest, like a gargantuan Christmas tree farm gone native, and miles of coastal cliffs that drop dramatically to the frothy sea below. 
   Within a 12,000-acre state-owned preserve that abuts the sea — known as the Cutler Coast Unit — the Bold Coast Trail hugs those cliff edges for nearly 5 miles, tracing every cove, every promontory, before wending another 5-plus miles inland through a forest spiced with brooks, wetlands and ponds. 
   It is one of the wildest remaining pieces of coastline in the Eastern United States, so unspoiled you can see moose in the woods and whales in the water but hike for hours without seeing a building. 
   The trail, which opened to the public only in 1994, is the happy ending to what might have been a shame. The land, owned by a forest-products company, went on the market and was to be carved up for development. Alarmed, the community launched a move to preserve the land, and eventually the state acquired it. 
   It was immediately obvious that this tract would be a great place for a trail, and the resulting layout is dramatic enough to deserve status as a destination hike. 
   You can make a long weekend out of a visit to the preserve, combining it with other coastal trails nearby and a visit to Cutler, as authentic a fishing village as you are likely to encounter anywhere in New England. There is the blue water of the harbor, the old wooden docks and the colorful lobster boats, with nary a tourism amenity to intrude. 
   This is the Bold Coast area of Maine, in Downeast Maine, which means it is serious lobster and blueberry country. Good lobster is not hard to find, and as for the blueberries, which grow in vast heath-like colonies, there is not only blueberry cobbler, but blueberry everything for sale. 
   The Bold Coast Trail gives hikers choices. From the parking area, it is only 1.5 miles to the cliffs, where, if you just want a quick look at this wild coast, you can scan the seascape and go back to the car; a great photo op for a hike of 3 miles. 
    Or you can hike to the sea and follow the coastal cliffs another 1.5 miles to the Black Pond Brook Cutoff, making a 5.8-mile loop. This is a perfect day hike for many people and will provide plenty of coastal views and a real feel for the forest. There is a map of the layout at the trailhead. 
    Or you can hike the entire 9.8-mile loop trail, which is, again, a mix of coast and forest hiking. At the farthest point from the parking lot, about 5 miles away, there are three widely spaced campsites tucked into the forest edge at cliffside and accessible only by the trail. Each has a view of the sea and the sunrise, your reward for lugging that backpack. 
    Allison and I wanted to hike the entire trail. The question was whether to camp or not, hiking 5 miles one day, 5 the next. With rain in the forecast, and the black flies bountiful (they’re at their worst in late May and early June but not much of a problem after that), we decided at the last minute not to camp. We would hike the whole thing in one day. 
    With spring in our step, we soon found ourselves at the edge of the sea, Grand Manan Island, Canada, in front of us, and to our right the coastline that we would follow for the next 3.8 miles. For the most part, the trail follows the cliff edge closely — so closely, there are places you need to be most careful. This is meant to be a natural area, and there are no railings. There is cliff, and then there is the water and rocks below. If you were to bring a child, you will hold hands here. 
    We could see for miles, and lobster pot buoys in the water below were the only sign of civilization. Out of sight, but only miles away, was Cutler Harbor and the fishermen who tend the pots. We saw only one small boat in more than two hours along the cliffs. 
    In places, the trail dipped down to water’s edge, over stones smoothed by years of crashing waves. A raft of eiders bobbed in the water — which is astonishingly clear — next to some exposed offshore rocks. Gulls flew by. From early summer to early fall, humpback, northern right, finback and minke whales can sometimes be seen from the trail. We missed the whales. 
    Up and down we went, from one cliffside outlook to the next on a trail marked mostly in blue blazes but sometimes with cairns, little pyramids of stones. This was not a mountain hike, but the elevation changes were continuous and burned up plenty of energy. At the 5-mile point, we stopped beside one of the campsites — thinking how nice it would have been to camp for the night — and had our lunch. We could see in the distance the lighthouse near Cutler Harbor. A flock of waxwings was busy in the trees behind us. 
    The coastal section of the trail easily ranks as one of the most dramatically scenic in the East, but the section through the forest is a pleasure in its own right. 
    The trees alone are enough to hold interest. At one point a boardwalk crosses a white cedar swamp, a habitat increasingly uncommon. In places, birches are abundant, or tamaracks, with delicate needles that are shed each fall. Wildlife is plentiful. 
    As we came down a small hill, a tiny mass of brilliant yellow feathers flitted from limb to limb, in sharp contrast to the deep green of a spruce bough not 10 feet off the ground. It was a magnolia warbler, one of the most colorful of warblers, with black streaks on its bright yellow breast. It is a species that spends its summers in spruces. 
    Stopping for every interesting bird — we also saw a three-toed woodpecker, a bird of the far North and a real find — and wanting to etch every vantage into our memories, we took nearly all day making the 9.8-mile loop. 
    Because the trail was more up and down than we expected, we were very tired and hungry when we finished. A lobster or fish dinner is never hard to find in Downeast Maine, nor is a good chowder, which was the first thing I ordered when we reached town. That’s how you toast a coastal hike. 
    
    If you plan to hike the Bold Coast Trail: 
    Directions: From Bangor, Maine, take Route 1A to Ellsworth, Route 1 to Machias. Turn right on Route 191, and continue 16.9 miles, through the village of Cutler to the trail parking area on the right. There is an entrance sign.

By Steve Grant

CUTLER, Me. – As I was about to pull the car into a small dirt parking lot, a yearling moose appeared at roadside, ambled into the deep spruce forest in front of us and disappeared.

This was going to be good. (more…)