Out on the water the sun starts to go down, an orange ball dropping into the ocean, the kind of daily finale the tourists applaud at Menemsha in August. Lev Wlodyka watches it appreciatively, and suddenly prime time has arrived. The monofilament peels off my reel, and as I wait for the moment to set the hook Lev starts to coach.

“Hit him, hit him, hit him!”

I close the bail and lift and the rod arcs. With a jolt I’m on. The striper holds in deep water for thirty seconds, sulking, then begins to pull out line against the drag – one, two, three broad-shouldered hauls. It swims west and Lev ducks underneath my line and I move with the fish to the other side of the stern.

“That’s a good fish,” Lev says, his thoughts turning immediately to how we will split the grand-prize Chevy Silverado he imagines me winning. “Fifty percent, right?”

I suggest 75 or even 95 percent for him – it’s his boat, his bait, his know-how. All I’ve really done is show up and hold the rod.

“I’ll take that action,” he says.

While we fantasize, a problem arises.

“You’re on a rock,” Lev says. “Feel the rock?”

No, I don’t.

The striper has wrapped the line around a boulder below us, and I can envision it rubbing the line against the rock, trying to saw itself free. Lev springs into action, firing up the engine and steering around in a circle to undo the damage. In a minute, the fish is off the rock and I’m reeling it to the boat.

Lev pulls the fish up on the gunwale by its lower lip and works the hook free of its jaw.

“Thirty-pounder,” he estimates. “Thirty-something.”

“You should take it for your neighbor,” I tell him.

“Nah, it’s too big. You want to weigh it?”

He holds up the fish. It’s motionless in his hands, and I admire the dusky lines shooting down its flanks. Big stripers have always looked majestic to me out of the water, with their sharp dorsal fins standing up like a crown. I think for a few seconds. This is close to the largest bass I’ve ever caught. At the same time, the leaderboard fish run between forty-five and fifty-six pounds. A thirty-pounder is nothing. I’m thinking like Lev, who has caught too many fish to be sentimental about one this size. “Nah,” I say finally. I don’t even ask to hold the fish or get a picture for my wife and daughter back home. We’re out here for fifties, right?

Back in the water it goes, and as we return to the spot Lev tells me to stay sharp. “It’s going to be nonstop. This place is stacked!” Our beers go untouched for another half hour as we stand at attention and get hit after hit. Lev puts one foot in front of the other, his rod held out to the fish. He pulls a few feet of line off the reel and holds it in his fingers like a bowstring, so that if a fish hits he has an extra second to react before the line peels out. A bass yanks at his eel, and he lets it run until he senses that the fish has it. Then he rears back and he’s on. But it’s nothing huge. We end up with a couple of stripers each and a bluefish. We spot a bass thrashing on the surface of the water and Lev pilots Wampum over to check it out. The striper is on its side, and Lev sinks the hook of his gaff into its flank and pulls it onboard. The pig had choked to death on a bait fish known as scup – one that was too large to fit down its throat.

Then, with that omen, the spot turns off. “Come on!” Lev protests. He tries hailing his friends. “Speakeasy, Speakeasy, howboutcha?” he calls over the radio. Silence. He smacks the steering wheel and lets out a frustrated bark. We reel up and he jams the throttle down and points the boat back toward Menemsha.

Lev has enough experience on the water to know when a spot isn’t happening, and tonight it isn’t happening. There will be other nights.

After I drive down to the weigh station empty-handed night after night for several weeks, Louisa Gould takes to taunting me. The official derby photographer and art gallery owner is well on her way to a fourteenth place finish in the boat grand slam standings with an impressive four-fish total of 54.08 pounds. All I’ve weighed in is a lone bluefish – and a relatively petite one at that – caught a month earlier on Ed Jerome’s charter boat, the Wayfarer. Louisa doesn’t seem to be buying my story about the thirty-pounder I got with Lev on Wampum, or the eight-and-a-half-pound albie I landed on Lobsterville jetty, or the albies and bonito I caught on the Wyknot with Patrick Jenkinson. By not weighing in these fish, by not putting them on the record, it’s as if I have passed up a basic civil right. This is how it works: If you catch a fish that’s big enough to make you wonder about weighing it in, then you should. You might win a daily pin. You might need it for your grand slam down the road. When in doubt, weigh it.

The day before they close the weigh station for the season, I decide it’s time to take what I’ve learned about the Vineyard beaches and relieve the Great Fish Gods of one decent striper to bring to Edgartown – if only to answer Louisa’s jeers. A friendly fisherman suggests I try Cape Pogue Gut. I stop in at Dick’s Bait and Tackle, where Mark Plante is razzing thirteen-year-old Chris Morris about his first-place bluefish and vowing to catch a bigger one. I buy some eels, stop in at a bar in Oak Bluffs to stuff myself with a burrito, then ride the On Time over to Chappaquiddick under the setting sun. It’s dark by the time I turn down the dirt road leading to the parking lot at the Gut. I pull a fleece over my sweatshirt and climb down the steep staircase that leads from the top of a cliff to the beach.

To the west, the lights of Edgartown flicker in the distance. To the north, Cape Pogue Bay is enclosed by a long sandy arm, the fist of which ends across from where I’m standing. A river of saltwater and bait fish and stripers flows in and out according to the whim of the tides. The wind is in my face, a bracing taste of late fall.

I open my bucket and, using Steve Amaral’s trick, toss an eel on the sand and let it batter itself. Then I take it by the head and hook it through one eye. The thing writhes and corkscrews as if it’s receiving a jolt of electricity. I wade out and cast before it can wrap its body around the hook in a slimy knot, as eels tend to do in a frantic, futile bid for escape. I start cranking it back as slowly as I can, concentrating so I can feel the flutter of eel terror if a striper swims close to investigate. I work for an hour. Nothing. Crunching over the sand to try a different stretch of water, I run into a couple of fishermen.

“You looking to leave?” one of them asks.

“Huh?”

“The stairs are behind you,” he says.

I’m not sure if he’s giving me a polite hint to beat it before he sucker-punches me, but I discover that the man’s friend is none other than Ron Domurat, and he’s reeling in a striper. We exchange greetings and I walk upstream from them and start anew. Line in the water, I crank the reel at an achingly slow speed. After a few minutes I discover I’ve let the gusts wrap my line around my reel handle, and as I free it a fish hits and hooks itself. I reel it in: just a short striper.

A few minutes pass. The current slacks as the tide begins to turn. My mind wanders. I’m thinking about other surf-casters on other beaches. Then I’m thinking about home and how strangely different my life will be in four days when I’m back to the everyday grind. And then, without any warning from the eel on the end of my line, I feel the solid punch of a striped bass and I’m on. The fish yanks out line, swims off for thirty yards, pulses in the current for a minute, then gives up and comes right ashore. I drag it up on the beach and measure it with my outstretched fingers. It’s four hands, about thirty-six inches.

Ron starts to walk over. “Good fish?”

“Not bad.”

He stands beside me and we study it. “That’s a good fish, Dave. You should weigh it in. That’ll get you a pin!”

I pile some wet seaweed on the fish and get my line back in the water, hoping for more. I see the third fisherman get a bass and head to the weigh-in. I look at my watch. It’s nine. I grab the fish under the gill plate and climb up the staircase to the parking lot. The man is stowing his gear away, then he walks over and peers at me from under his sweatshirt hood. “Don’t tell anybody where you got that fish,” he hisses.

I laugh.

“I’m serious!” he says. “There’ll be forty people here tomorrow night.”

When I arrive at the weigh station Louisa is there. “I’ve got to get a picture of this,” she says, snapping away as I lay the fish on the table. It comes in at a respectable 17.82 pounds. People had described to me what they felt as they brought a special fish into the weigh station: Their hearts raced, or their hands shook, or they felt faint. (One dude felt so light-headed after he brought in a big bonito that EMTs had to transport him from the weigh station to the hospital.) I think about those stories as I pick up my official weigh-in slip and feel an upwelling of pride. Looking back, it’s hard to understand why. It’s a fine fish but it’s not the biggest I’ve ever caught. And other than Louisa, no one in the weigh station takes notice or claps me on the back. Still I have the crazy idea that I’ve proven something. 

Excerpted from The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish, published in April by Atlantic Monthly Press, and written by David Kinney.