Born to Fish

by Tim Gallagher

  He usually bought eels and other bait at Jack’s Shoreline Bait and Tackle in Westbrook, Connecticut, which attracted a broad cross-section of striped bass fishermen, ranging from the ultrawealthy to those who might not have two nickels to rub together. Here they met as equals to hang out and talk about the fish all of them pursued so avidly. The place felt like a relic from the early 1900s. Some of the top striped bass fishermen on the Eastern Seaboard frequented the shop. Greg found himself spending more and more of his free time at Jack’s—at least the time when he wasn’t out fishing. He enjoyed hanging around with others who shared his keen love of striped bass fishing.

  The shop happened to be an official weighing station for the Striper Cup, the largest tournament of its kind in the Northeast, sponsored each year by On the Water magazine and attracting thousands of competitors. Jack Katzenbach, the owner of the shop, knew what a great striped bass fisherman Greg was and one day told him: “You catch bigger fish day in and day out than any of these guys. You should enter the Striper Cup.”

  The tournament lasts nearly five months each year, from May 1 to September 15, and it had already been going on for more than a month, so everyone had a huge head start on Greg. He had never before even thought about entering a tournament, but: What the hell, he thought. Why not? And as with everything he does, Greg was all in. He started going out every night, in all kinds of weather—and Long Island Sound can have remarkably brutal conditions, with deadly storms sweeping into the area in a matter of minutes. It didn’t matter to Greg; he was out there braving the roughest seas when everyone else stayed home.

  Greg usually fished either alone or with Brian Beauchamp, a fellow electrician who had gone through the union apprenticeship with him. The two later worked together at the Connecticut Department of Transportation, doing electrical work and also driving snowplows in winter. It was Brian who got Greg his job at the DOT. When they fished together, they would net each other’s fish or steer the boat when one of them had a fish on.

  Late one night that June they were fishing in Long Island Sound, repeatedly drifting over Southwest Reef (where he later caught his world-record striped bass). It was a rough night, with gale-force winds blowing in from the north, throwing up vast sheets of water, turning Long Island Sound into a seething cauldron of churning sea. Suddenly Greg felt a fish take the bait, and he set the hook hard. The high-pitched scream of the reel pierced the night as the fish stripped out yard after yard of line. He knew it would soon clean out his reel and break off. His only chance was to move the boat in the direction the fish was swimming and try to reel in as much of the line as he could before it was all gone. This sometimes happens to shore fishermen when they hook a huge fish, and it starts peeling away all of their line. About all they can do is increase the tension on the line and hope for the best. But in a boat you can follow the fish’s escape path and try to keep up with it, reeling in the line as you make your way closer. The problem on this night, though, was that he couldn’t see which direction the fish was moving. The night was pitch black, with the wind howling across the sea, blowing saltwater spray into his face, stinging his eyes. And the fish had taken off like a rocket.

  Brian held a spotlight on the fishing line so Greg could drive toward it, but it was hard—Greg was driving and reeling at the same time, trying his best to gain back the line the fish had peeled out. He didn’t want to blow it. He knew the fish was huge, maybe the biggest one he’d ever hooked, and he was determined to land it.

  After nearly an hour of fighting, Greg sensed the fish was coming near. He nodded to Brian, who picked up the landing net and stood ready while the boat rose up and down in the storm-tossed sea and they both struggled to stay on their feet. As the striper came into view, Brian deftly slipped the net underneath it and hoisted it up into the boat.

  The fish tipped the scales at sixty-nine pounds—at that point, the largest striped bass ever caught in the history of the Striper Cup. No one had even caught a sixty-pounder in the tournament before. Amazingly, Greg caught two more fish that topped sixty pounds before the Striper Cup was over. For this, he won Angler of the Year and Striped Bass of the Year.

  To put Greg’s accomplishment in perspective: in the more than a century sport fishermen have been recording the size of the large game fish they catch, fewer than 100 striped bass have been caught that weighed sixty pounds or more. Tony Checko, author of The Striped Bass 60+ Pound Club, interviewed Greg shortly after his tournament win and told him he didn’t need to catch a world-record striped bass to be a famous fisherman; catching three sixty-plus pounders in a year was far more impressive than the world record set by Albert McReynolds. At that time, Greg had never even heard of McReynolds or the world-­record striped bass he had caught one stormy night in 1982 from a stone jetty on the New Jersey coast—a record that had stood for nearly three decades.

  Greg was a huge sensation at that year’s StriperFest—the East Coast’s biggest fishing party, held each year at the conclusion of the Striper Cup. He had never attended the event before and was amazed how many people showed up and the adulation they showered on him.

  “There’s ten thousand people, and you’re the guy,” he said. The tournament officials presented him with a mount of the biggest fish he’d caught, and he held it high above his head, doing a “fish pump.” He was the first person to do that, and the crowd loved it. Greg enjoyed the attention of the people at StriperFest and loved talking to them and telling them stories. He knew he’d be back again. His life as a tournament angler had begun.

  For his family life, though, it was a different story.

  * * *

  One More Drift

  Fishing has ended a lot of relationships for Greg. No one could put up with his obsession for the long haul. His wife, Jackie, lasted the longest, three years, and they had a daughter together. It had started off so great. Jackie even liked to fish—but that was true of a number of women he’d been involved with over the years.

  “Some of them said they enjoyed fishing, or even loved it,” said Greg. “But not my kind of fishing. Their attitude would change when things got rough. I fish through anything. As soon as they got a taste of that they’d realize, ‘I’m on the verge of dying out here.’ And they were like, ‘You’re sick!’ ”

  Greg took Jackie fishing with him a lot when they first got together. But she was a nurse and had to work nights, so after a couple of hours she’d say, “We need to leave now. I have to get to work.” And Greg would invariably reply, “All right, just one more drift,” and he’d drive the boat all the way back around and let the current slowly carry them over the reef again . . . and again . . . and again, saying, “One more drift. One more drift.”

  “I would make her late for work, and she’d freak out, calling me a motherfucker all the way home. ‘Well don’t come with me then,’ I’d say. ‘You don’t want to fish anyway, what the fuck.’ No one wants to do it the way I do it. No one can do it the way I do it. It got to where my closest friends wouldn’t fish with me anymore. When they wanted to leave, they couldn’t. I only left when I was ready to leave, which was hardly ever.”

  And Greg never thought to bring food or something to drink on his fishing excursions. One time, when the stripers were moving through, he went out with only one small Gatorade on board and fished three entire tides—that’s eighteen hours. Going out for some quick fishing, a couple of casts, just doesn’t happen with Greg. If the fish are biting, he doesn’t stop unless he’s out of bait or gas or the boat is sinking.

  “So much shit has happened to me out there,” said Greg. “I’m out there at night, all by myself, running on empty, and the fish are biting, so I fish until I run out of gas. I know that’s not normal, but that’s the way I am.”

  Jackie was on the boat with Greg one stormy night in Long Island Sound, tossed by wind and waves and torrential rain, when the motor sputtered and died. And they sat there as the rain poured down on them endlessly—sheets of it, buckets of it, drenching them
until they were sodden from head to foot. Jackie was furious. Greg’s old friend Verne Carlson and a couple of other people finally came out to rescue them, and as they pulled up, Greg had just hooked a striper. “Look at him, he’s fucking crazy,” said Verne, laughing. “He’s got a fish on.”

  Things only went downhill from there. “You’re not going fishing tonight,” Jackie would scream as he was putting his fishing rods in the truck. “Shut up!” he’d say. And it would go back and forth: “I hate you! Don’t come back!” “Good, I won’t!” And he would be off, braving the foulest weather alone in the roughest seas: one more drift . . . one more drift.

  One day in the late afternoon, he saw a horrendous storm speeding toward him, with black skies, high winds, and crashing claps of thunder and lightning. But the fish were biting, so he stayed, pushing himself to endure beyond all bounds of common sense and reason, finally having to flee for his life at full throttle as the storm came sweeping like a tempest across the sound. He was in a small open boat and had to find shelter immediately.

  “I could barely make it into the first marina,” said Greg. “There was an abandoned boat, a forty-footer, in dry storage there. I lifted up the hatchway, barely big enough to fit through, and climbed inside. The storm blasted through, dropping golf-ball-sized hail. I would’ve been dead if I didn’t make it to shelter in time.”

  The funny part is, Greg had been watching the storm moving in from the distance for an hour. He could have made it all the way back to his own marina and been driving home by the time it hit. But the fishing was too good for him to stop.

  Jackie called him on his cell phone as he lay huddled in the derelict boat, waiting for the storm to pass. “There’s no way you’re fishing in this,” she said, suspiciously. “What are you really doing?” Greg just hung up on her. As soon as the weather cleared, he motored back out into Long Island Sound—the deck of his boat still covered with icy slush from sleet and hailstones—and started fishing again.

  Greg and Jackie’s marriage didn’t end overnight. It wasn’t like there was one last straw. “There was a lot of straw,” said Greg. If you look at the arc of Greg’s life from a relationship standpoint, this was as good as it gets. This was the time when he almost made it work—but then it didn’t.

  He’d pushed relationships far beyond the breaking point many times before. There was Rebecca, a woman he met and fell in love with one winter. They soon moved in together. Greg spent the cold winter months tying trout flies, which Rebecca found quaint. She had no idea of the extent of his interest in fishing and that what he was doing was building an arsenal of flies for the upcoming trout season. As soon as spring arrived, he pretty much disappeared, going fly fishing every night after work on the Salmon River, an hour’s drive away.

  “After work I would just shoot up there and fish till nine o’clock, when it got dark, and be home at midnight,” said Greg. “Then I worked all day. So a month went by, and all I heard was shit. I kept buying all kinds of fishing gear. I had so many rods.”

  Then one Saturday morning Rebecca asked, “Where you going?”

  “I’m going fishing.”

  She left the bedroom, and Greg thought she was in the bathroom. Then he heard loud crashing and crunching sounds coming from the driveway.

  “I looked out the window, and all my stuff was piled up: my fishing vest, my boots, my rods—all kinds of rods, not just fly rods, all of my rods,” said Greg. “And she was running over them, going back and forth with her car.”

  She finally came inside and said, “Well, it looks like you can’t go fishing. So now what are we going to do?”

  “You forgot the rod I always keep on the dashboard of my truck,” he said. He walked outside and climbed into his pickup.

  “If you go fishing, don’t ever come back!” she said.

  “And that was the end of it,” said Greg. “I just cleaned out my stuff and left. I never saw her again.”

  Greg is not without self-awareness: far from it. He’s a very sensitive person. His brother Dave, Aunt Cookie, Bear, and virtually everyone else I interviewed told me that. It’s just that he is so dedicated to his passions, it’s hard for him to give enough time to someone else to sustain a relationship. Even the women in Greg’s life who’ve had an interest in hunting and fishing could never comprehend how far he was willing to go to catch that fish or shoot that big buck, facing frigid temperatures, treacherous seas, and endless untold dangers on drift after drift, night after night, trip after trip . . . never resting, never stopping, not even to take a drink of water. It makes a person hard. Greg knows that.

  “The last thing I ever want to hear is that you want to go home, you’ve had enough, you’re scared or cold, or you have to go to work in the morning!” said Greg, then paused wistfully. “It seems like everyone who ever mattered in my life has just been broken down by me to the point of no return. I’ve ruined many relationships because of my selfishness. I’ve hurt so many people who just wanted to be with me . . . people who actually loved me. And I always used to think they were the ones being selfish. Who were they to stop me from doing what I loved so much? Why should I conform to what they want? And I have tried. I’ve sat through their events and pretended to like their friends, when I was actually sizing their friends up and not being able to comprehend how soft some of them were. And comparing these people to what I can endure or enjoy is not good for a healthy relationship. And they all fail. But the great loves of my life never leave my mind, even though they’re gone forever. I have not stopped loving any of them.”

  Greg and Jackie are still officially married, but they haven’t lived together since the spring of 2011. They see each other briefly every weekend when he comes to pick up his daughter Jenny on Friday night and returns her home on Sunday night. His relationship with Jenny is the most important thing in his life.

  “My daughter Jenny just turned ten years old, and my views on life, especially my life, have started to change,” said Greg. “She stays with me on the weekends, and I look forward to seeing and spending time with her. I pray to God every day for her safety, sometimes two or three times a day. I live my life now thinking twice about some of the situations I don’t have to put myself in. I have never loved anyone or anything more than her. She has changed everything about me and the way I see the world.”

  Jenny has had a huge impact in Greg’s life. He’s no longer as quick to make rash decisions that might put his life at risk, and he’s less likely to get into a fight if he’s provoked. He often takes her fishing with him, though never in dangerous conditions. In 2012, when Jenny was five years old, she won top honors in the annual North Haven Trout Derby, catching a whopping twenty-inch trout. Greg had won the same event in 1975 at age seven.

  “I’m not so hungry to kill myself to catch a fish anymore,” said Greg. “Everything I do now is because of her. If she wasn’t around, I probably wouldn’t be alive today. My luck was bound to run out sometime.”

  * * *

  Anatomy of a World-Record Catch

  Greg hadn’t even planned to go fishing on that Thursday night, August 4, 2011. He’d been fishing hard for more than a week, going out right after work and not getting home till the early hours of morning. And his friend Brian Beauchamp, who fished with Greg almost every night, couldn’t go that day. It was his birthday, and he planned to spend it with his wife, whom he had only recently married. Instead, it was Matt Farina who talked him into going fishing. He’s an old friend who grew up in North Haven but went to another high school. Now a professional painter, he had been painting Greg’s house and had gone fishing with Greg only a couple of times, most recently earlier that week. But he had become completely hooked since Greg taught him some techniques that boosted his fishing skills.

  “I took him out and showed him the way I do it, and he was catching some really nice fish,” said Greg. “He really wanted to go out fishing again.” And of course it never takes much encouragement to get Greg to go. At the end of the day, t
hey were on their way, driving to Greg’s boat, with Matt still in his paint clothes.

  It was a beautiful evening, with a first-quarter moon visible overhead and flat-calm seas, at dead high tide, slacking out—a perfect time to fish. Although it was nearly 8:00 p.m., the sun was still out, hovering just above the horizon, flooding the evening with rich golden light, dazzling like a thousand diamonds as it touched the water.

  “That first-quarter moon is when I always like to fish,” said Greg. “I’d been crushing it all week long, catching some big fish.”

  Greg headed out to Southwest Reef, his favorite reef in Long Island Sound, and got all of his equipment ready. He whacked an eel against the boat’s gunwale to stun it, then pushed the hook through it just below its head. The rattle sinker was already attached about a foot and a half from the eel. When they were ready, Greg began motoring toward the reef, then cut the motor and let the boat’s momentum drift them slowly onward. He and Matt lowered their eels over the side, running their lines out until they touched bottom, then reeling back so the bait would hang a foot or so above the rocks as they passed over the reef. As they drifted above the huge boulder where big fish often hang out, Greg felt a hard strike and jerked up on the rod to set the hook.

  “When I yanked it, I’m sure I pulled it right out of her mouth,” said Greg. “I could tell she never even touched the hook. I just know the feeling when they grab the back of the eel. They clamp onto it hard, and when you pull it, it feels like you have them for a second, then it pulls out of their mouth.”

  Greg could tell it was a very good fish, so he was careful how he set up for the next drift, taking the boat wide, in a huge circle, completely avoiding the spot where the big bass was feeding as he moved the boat into place for his next drift. Then they slowly drifted back over the exact spot again. Greg felt two big taps and set the hook hard. It felt like it was stuck in the rocks, but Greg knew better. Matt was doubtful.