Born to Fish

by Tim Gallagher

  “That’s not a fish,” he said. “You’re hooked on the bottom.”

  “You’re wrong, man. That is definitely a fish . . . a monster.”

  Greg had been having a lot of trouble lately getting snagged in lobster pots that commercial fishermen had put in this reef, right in the best places to drift for striped bass. But he’d recently straightened out the situation. He started pulling up the lobster pots from these prime areas and moving them to deeper water right before he went fishing each day, to the deep chagrin of the lobsterman who owned them. Then one day, a week before this trip, the lobsterman was waiting for him at the parking lot in front of Jack’s Shoreline Bait and Tackle when he came in from fishing. They had a brief fistfight, after which they came to an understanding: the man would no longer put lobster pots in Greg’s prime fishing areas.

  Sunset was fast approaching when Greg hooked the fish. The bass stayed down for maybe ten minutes, then came shooting up, making a huge splash as it breached the surface, scattering water twenty feet in all directions. Its spiked dorsal fin looked almost like a cape, glistening spectacularly in the last rays of golden light as the sun touched the horizon.

  “I thought, that is a huge fish,” said Greg. “It was just massive, and it was pulling the boat. The tide was coming in really slowly, and the fish was running with the tide toward Madison, a town over. It pulled the boat about a mile.”

  At the end of the fight, more than thirty minutes later, Greg brought the fish alongside and Matt attempted to net it, but it saw the boat and shot right back down to the bottom, pulling the line under the boat. Afraid the line might break against the gunwale, Greg rushed over to the side to try to hold the rod out away from the boat, but he slipped on some eel slime and fell hard, smashing his ribs against the gunwale. (This was the exact spot where he always hit the eels to stun them, so it was very slimy there.)

  When Greg finally brought the fish alongside again, Matt netted it against the swim platform and tried to haul it up, but the net snagged on the platform. The huge striper thrashed frantically as Matt struggled to untangle the net. When it finally came loose, he tried to raise it from the water, but the net handle wasn’t up to the task.

  “Matt tried to lift the net horizontally, and the handle started to bend,” said Greg. “With a big fish like that, you need to pull it straight up and lift it in. I grabbed the side of the net with one hand and helped him haul it into the boat.” But Greg had no complaints about Matt. “He did a really great job netting that fish. It wasn’t easy.”

  Greg knew right away that it was the biggest striped bass he’d ever caught, but he had no idea it might be a world record. He’d never really thought about such things, but he did know this would completely shake up the standings in the Striper Cup. Less than a month and a half earlier, on June 19, Peter Vican had caught a striped bass weighing a staggering seventy-seven pounds, four ounces, off Block Island and looked like a shoo-in to win top honors in the tournament. Vican’s fish was then the second-largest striper ever caught by a sport fisherman. But Greg’s fish would definitely take over the top spot now and almost certainly be the winner.

  Greg had a fish hold in the front of his boat that would usually easily accommodate any fish he kept. But he had to bend this fish to get it inside. And then he did something no other tournament angler would even think about doing if they’d caught a monster fish: he kept fishing—for hours. He and Matt had basically just gotten out there when Greg caught the fish, and there was no way they were going back to shore. So they spent all evening out there and caught and released several more nice fish, including the largest striper Matt had ever landed. From time to time throughout the evening, Greg would start wondering if the fish was as large as it seemed, and he’d go open the fish hold and look at it again. Yep, it really is that big, he’d think, then go back to fishing.

  Unfortunately, their handling of this enormous bass was a near-textbook case of what not to do if you catch a potential world-record fish. The main concern is getting it to a weigh station as soon as possible, because it will start dehydrating and losing weight almost immediately. But then, even after hours of fishing, instead of trying to have the fish weighed, they went out to celebrate. After tying up the boat in front of Bill’s Seafood in Westbrook, Greg laid the fish on the dock so everyone in the restaurant and bar could see it and take pictures. He and Matt stayed there till the bar closed. The fish easily could have lost three or four pounds or more in that time.

  “It didn’t fit in my cooler, so it hung around outside all night,” said Greg. “I weighed it on a cheap digital scale at home, and it was eighty-three pounds, but it was probably more like eighty-five.”

  When he saw how much it weighed, Greg called and left a message on the answering machine at Jack’s Shoreline Bait and Tackle saying that he had caught an eighty-three-pound striped bass and would be coming there in the morning to have it officially weighed. Then he dropped, exhausted, across his bed and fell into a deep sleep, leaving the fish in the back of his pickup truck until midmorning—and it was a warm morning. Most tournament anglers would have covered it with wet towels, doing everything possible to reduce the fish’s dehydration.

  By the time Greg woke up, news about the giant striper was already blazing up and down the East Coast. Between Jack calling a few people and some of the patrons at Bill’s Seafood putting up pictures of Greg’s fish, the word was out. Even though there had not yet been an official weighing, fishermen, newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and even someone from the popular Good Morning America television show flooded Jack’s shop first thing in the morning. But Greg was a no-show, still sound asleep at home. Jack phoned him again and again to no avail.

  Greg had the Weather Station on in the background as he was getting dressed and brushing his teeth, and he heard the TV reporter mention that a world-record striped bass had been caught the night before off Connecticut. He had no idea she was talking about him.

  “I was thinking, Wow, there must be some really big fish around, as I was gargling and spitting out my mouthwash,” said Greg.

  By the time Greg got to Jack’s shop, most of the media had given up and left. About a dozen fishermen had lingered on, hoping to see the fish. Greg still felt exhausted. He dropped the fish off with Jack, saying, “Here, do what you gotta do,” and went outside to get some fresh air. He hadn’t gone far when he was hit by a wave of nausea and vomited in the parking lot of a Jet Ski dealership. A woman inside saw him and brought him a wet towel to clean himself off.

  “You’re Greg Myerson, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You just caught the world-record striped bass.”

  Greg was dumbfounded. “I just looked at her and said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” After that, he went back to get his fish. A lot of people had returned to the shop by then to see it, but Greg just picked it up and started to leave.

  “Hey, Greg. That fish weighed 81.88 pounds,” said Jack. “You should wait. A photographer from On the Water magazine is on his way here.”

  Greg shrugged and said he was taking it to Rick Newberg’s house just down the street. Jack called Rick a few minutes later and said, “Don’t let Greg leave.” He explained that the photographer was there and wanted to take pictures of Greg and the fish for a big feature article in the magazine. Rick tried to get Greg to stay, but he refused.

  “Fuck them. I feel like shit. I’m out of here,” said Greg as he climbed into his pickup truck.

  But Rick was adamant. “This is important,” he said. “You can’t go anywhere.” He got in front of Greg’s truck and wouldn’t budge.

  “Get the fuck out of my way!”

  At that instant, the photographer pulled into his driveway. Greg finally agreed to let him take a few pictures of him holding up his potential world-record striped bass. It was still only potential because catching a fish like that is only the first step on the road to having it recognized as a world record.

&nbs
p; * * *

  Aftermath

  Walter Anderson barely knew Greg when he caught the world-­record striped bass. He’d seen him a couple of times at Jack’s Shoreline Bait and Tackle and once been regaled there by one of his great fishing stories. The first time they met, he and Greg and several other anglers were sitting around the shop, talking about past fishing adventures.

  “I remember he was telling a story about the San Juan River of New Mexico,” said Walter. The river is an incredibly beautiful, breathtaking place and has a special significance for Walter: it was where he caught the three largest trout of his life.

  “Greg told a great story about how he and his football buddy were fishing in a drift boat with a local guide,” said Walter. “His friend kept hooking him in the ear with a fly on his back casts, so Greg ended up punching him and getting into a big brawl. So this poor guide in the boat, he’s got these two enormous guys, two football players, fighting in his drift boat. I got the biggest kick out of that story.”

  He told Greg they should go fishing together in Walter’s boat, which he often takes to Block Island and other striped bass hotspots, and they agreed they’d do it sometime. But the next time Walter heard about Greg was when Jack Katzenbach, who owned the bait shop, called on the morning of August 5, 2011, and told him Greg Myerson had caught a striped bass the night before that weighed eighty-two pounds. Walter almost dropped the phone.

  “That’s a world record,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Jack. “I’ve got a bunch of people coming here. The phone’s been ringing off the hook, and some of it is real nasty.” He asked Walter if he’d mind coming down to the shop to give him advice on how to handle all the phone calls and media attention Greg’s record-breaking bass was attracting. Walter is a renowned expert in the communications field. He had a lengthy career as a journalist and author and for many years was editor (and later CEO and chairman) of Parade, a popular weekly magazine appearing each Sunday in some 700 newspapers across the United States.

  Jack also hoped Walter could give some advice to Greg, who had quickly gone from the early euphoria of catching such a huge fish into a deep funk. This was no doubt partly from exhaustion—but he’d also started having deep regrets about killing such a magnificent fish just to win a tournament.

  “When I thought of everything that fish went through in her life—all those years facing the dangers of migrations, nor’easters, red tides, and pollution—and here I am, I wiped it out,” he said. “It’s bittersweet. People think it’s just a fish, but it’s a lot more than that to me.” And worse, from Greg’s standpoint, he killed the fish because he was competing in the Striper Cup and needed to catch a huge fish to overtake Peter Vican and win. Any other time, he would have released it in an instant.

  “I’ve always had a lot of respect for the great fish I’ve caught, and I usually let them go. My friends would look at me like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But I’d put a huge striper over the side because it was awesome, and I’d think, Why kill it? I feel strongly about that.”

  He didn’t care that the striper he caught that evening might be a world-record fish. It was a beautiful, pristine, spectacular striped bass—just the kind of fish whose genes should be passed along to the next generation.

  “A twenty-pound bass lays about 400,000 eggs a year,” Greg told me, “but this one would lay six, seven, eight million eggs.” Viewed in that way, her death was an immense loss to the native East Coast striped bass population, which is currently in serious decline.

  On top of his personal regrets about killing the fish, Greg also had to face an onslaught of vicious rumors about his world-record catch—that somehow it had all been faked. Walter invited Greg to his home, and they had a long talk about the situation.

  “I would say he was pretty close to depression within twenty-four hours of catching that fish,” said Walter. “He went from an extraor­dinary high to a depression.”

  Greg could never have anticipated all the phone calls that would come flooding in from people trying to get in touch with him about the fish. Sadly, many of the calls were from people who were disputing the validity of his catch or just trying to insult him.

  “Look, I don’t need this,” he told Walter. “I’ve got a job. I’ve got things to do. I’ll go back and fish tonight.” And Greg actually did go fishing the next night. When he got to the reef where he’d caught the enormous striper, boats were lined up virtually wall-to-wall there, with dozens of anglers eager to beat his accomplishment. No one was catching much. Greg casually drifted across the reef, caught a sixty-pounder, and released it in front of everyone.

  There was always a significant chance that Greg would just say to hell with it and give up his claim to the world record. He didn’t care about such things. He just wanted to go fishing.

  The conspiracy theorists had had an instant field day with Greg’s world-record claim—the fix was in; the scale it was weighed on was rigged; the fish had been stuffed with lead sinkers to raise its weight; or, most outrageous of all, a trawler had scooped the fish up in its net and sold it to Greg.

  “Can you imagine?” said Walter. “It was all so preposterous. That fish was absolutely legitimate. So I talked to Greg about it and tried to settle him down. He was so upset. He just wanted it to go away. He told me, ‘To hell with the fish, I’m going fishing.’ But I wasn’t going to let that happen. There was no doubt that this was the world record, and I wanted him to get credit for it. I told him, ‘No, no, no, no! You spent a lifetime learning how to fish. You’re one of the best fishermen in the country. Do not walk away from this.’ ”

  Walter told me it was hard for him to contain his own temper, and he may well have given up if it had been his own record he was defending. But he had come to like and admire Greg, and he was determined he would get the recognition he deserved.

  “In some ways, he was almost like a little brother or a son to me,” he said. “I felt he was a really good guy, and he needed help.”

  Walter took Greg step-by-step through the application process for filing a fishing world record with the International Game Fish Association. With a record as important as the All-Tackle World Record for the largest striped bass, it was important to get it right.

  “Just tell me the story chronologically from the beginning to the end, exactly what happened,” Walter told him. “There’s no detail that’s too insignificant.” He jotted it all down, helped Greg fill out the world-record application, and sent it to the IGFA.

  Walter told him never to embellish the story of how he caught the fish. “Never forget the attorney’s dictum, ‘Truth is the unassailable defense,’ ” he said. “Just tell the truth. Here’s what you want to beware of: when we start to tell a story, the first time we tell the truth, the second time we add a little point, the third time we begin to exaggerate. Don’t do that. Always tell the story exactly as it occurred.” He also warned him that reporters and writers might add their own embellishments when they tell his story, and if their accounts are too outrageous he should write to them and say, “I did not say that, I said this,” and keep a record of it.

  Walter encouraged him to ignore what other people might be saying about him. “I kept telling him, ‘Greg, this is not a reflection on you, it’s a reflection on them.’ It’s funny, some of these serious fishermen can be the nicest guys in the world, but when a record like this is broken, they are overcome by jealousy,” said Walter. “It’s breathtaking to see how their character changes. It’s, ‘Why not me? Why didn’t I catch that fish?’ I told Greg, ‘He who angers you conquers you. I get mad at someone, I’m so angry I can’t sleep, so who does the anger hurt?’ ”

  But sometimes Walter wasn’t able to obey his own sage advice, and his temper got the best of him. One day he was taking his twelve-year-old grandson Jonathan fishing, and they stopped at a bait shop in Branford on the way. He overheard two fishermen talking loudly about “this asshole who claims he caught the biggest striped bass.�
��

  “The intelligent part of me was saying, ‘Walter, do not get involved. Keep your mouth shut.’ But the emotional part took over, and I went over and said, ‘Have you ever met Greg Myerson?’ ‘No, have you?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I have. Let me tell you a little bit about him. He was an All-American linebacker. He’s six foot four and 270 pounds, with a two-inch fuse. I think he’d be really interested in hearing what you have to say. Would you like to meet him? He could be here in twenty minutes.’ ”

  Everything got very quiet in the shop. Walter paid for his bait and walked outside with his grandson. “Grandpa, I never knew you could be so scary,” said Jonathan. “You really scared those men.”

  Walter had to laugh. “At that point, I had heard so much of this kind of thing, I guess the Marine in me came out,” he said.

  After they sent in the forms, Greg waited . . . and waited. The world-record approval process took four months. When he got the phone call that his record had been certified, he was in the emergency room of the local hospital, being treated for an infection in his foot where he had been poked by one of the sharp spikes on the back of a striped bass.

  * * *

  The Striped Bass Dilemma

  Greg was right to be concerned about the well-being of the native Atlantic Coast striped bass and the need to protect the large breeders like the world-record bass he had caught. These fish are facing the most dire threats to survival that they’ve experienced since the late 1970s, when they were nearly driven to extinction.

  At that time, the Atlantic States Fisheries Commission seemed unable to take meaningful conservation measures. Established in the early 1940s, the commission is made up of representatives appointed by state governors along the Atlantic Seaboard, with each state having one vote in the decisions they make. Their mandate is to work together to manage the fisheries resource they share and develop quotas for how many fish of each species (based on total tonnage) can be taken without adversely affecting their population. But all too often back then, the parochial interests of each state made it impossible to make compromises and achieve solutions. The states with major commercial fishing interests tended to shoot down any measures that would restrict the amount of striped bass they could harvest. Finally, in 1984, after intense lobbying by conservationists, most of whom were sport fishermen, the U.S. Congress passed the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, which forced the states to limit the number of bass caught or face a complete shutdown of all commercial and sport fishing of the species. The states complied, establishing a strict moratorium on catching striped bass, and they turned the species’ decline around.