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 Surfcasting Around the Block. “But it was by no means automatic. You’d go out and maybe get one fish a night, but it was a monster fish. We got skunked some nights, too.”
I visited Zambrotta recently at his home in Newport to discuss the Block Island glory days. A trim man with a white beard, Zambrotta, 67, is a retired Navy veteran who worked for years in the classified section of the Naval War College library in Newport. He fishes regularly on the rocks around Newport and still visits Block Island at least once a year, working some of the same spots where he and his friends created so many memories in the ’80s.
I asked Zambrotta about those big-fish years, which he researched for his book, relying on fishing logs and interviews with dozens of anglers. Knowing the vagaries of memory, the angler-author says he sought out people who had kept logs or written notes about their catches, including times, dates, conditions, lures and other details. “I always wanted to make sure I had the story right,” he says.
Zambrotta pulled out several large bags containing dozens of battered plugs—many of them needlefish—that he fished during those years. He also showed me a fish scale that he keeps in his wallet that came from a 56-pound Block Island striper, his biggest bass ever. The scale is larger than a quarter. He likes to keep the fish close in memory. Striper fans will understand.
During the heyday on Block Island, you’d barely raise an eyebrow when landing a striper weighing in the 30s. Every good surf angler on the island tossing an eel or a needlefish—the de rigueur lure at the time—was looking for a bass in the 40s or 50s. They dreamt of hooking one in the 60s—and maybe, just maybe, catching a 70-pounder from shore.
Many caught their personal best during those late-fall runs. Zambrotta has verified at least five bass taken by surfcasters during that period that weighed more than 60 pounds and one 70-pounder. “And you know there were more,” says Zambrotta, who landed two bass over 50 pounds on Block.
Some sharpies were hunting for a world-record striper, a record that was broken twice elsewhere in the early 1980s. Charter skipper Bob Rochetta smashed the 68-year-old striper record in 1981 with a 76-pounder taken off Montauk, New York, on a live eel from his 24-foot open boat. The following year, Albert McReynolds landed a 78.8-pound linesider from a New Jersey jetty. Given the concentration of large stripers feeding off Block from November to mid-December, it was not far-fetched to think the record might fall once more.
So it’s reasonable to suspect that at least one 80-plus-pound striped bass might have been hooked and lost at some point off Block during those years. “There were some really big fish out there,” Zambrotta says. After a night when big bass were feeding aggressively, he says, it was not unusual to hear reports the following morning about fish so large that they couldn’t be turned. “I hooked one last night and couldn’t stop it,” he says, parroting one of those conversations. “Or, I almost got spooled. That was pretty common.”
The equipment in the early to mid-1980s was not up to today’s standards. These were prebraid days, and graphite was just beginning to enter the scene. Zambrotta fished a 10-foot, honey-colored Lamiglas fiberglass rod with a Penn 704 loaded with either 15- or 20-pound Ande line. Leaders were 50- or 60-pound mono. Anglers had trouble turning or slowing big fish on 20-pound test when they headed into the rocks.
An untold number of jumbos were lost amid the island’s many boulder fields, where the obstacles include sharp-edged rocks, barnacles, mussels and stubborn wrack weed. One good chafing against a rock and a trophy fish was gone. At the time, that was called “getting rocked.” And if you hooked a big fish in a crowd, you had to deal with crossed lines and trying to follow your trophy down the picket line.
Offseason rentals were cheap back then, and some surf crews rented houses for weeks at a time. From a surfcaster’s perspective, the late fall storms were a blessing; they kept boat fishermen from making the 13-mile run to the island. “When the weather got snotty, it was the surfcasters’ turn,” Zambrotta says. “We had the whole island to ourselves.”
The Block Island bite occurred before cellphones and the explosion of social media. In the early 1980s, secrecy among surf fishermen was still the norm. Striper anglers gave away little information outside of their small group of trusted fishing friends. News of the fantastic catches on Block Island eventually slipped out in weekly fishing reports published in The Fisherman magazine’s New England edition, which was the main source of fishing news about stripers throughout the Northeast.
Those who caught big stripers on Block were not thrilled by the reports, which attracted more surf jockeys to the island. The Southwest Bar, a popular spot that Zambrotta says could comfortably hold 10 anglers at high water and more at low tide, became crowded out with more than 40 anglers some nights. After hooking large fish, anglers often had to follow their bass as it ran to the left or right, picking their way past others in the lineup while trying to remove plugs that had crossed their line. All in the dark.
Tempers sometimes flared, harsh words were exchanged, and the occasional punch was thrown, which was to be expected given that many anglers were selling their fish. “It was contentious because guys were making money,” says Zambrotta, noting that the extra money helped sustain island fishermen through the winter. Even those not selling their bass could easily become incensed if a newcomer cost them a once-in-a-lifetime fish.
At the end of one night, a fellow angler offered Zambrotta a ride back to the ferry. They didn’t get very far before they discovered several lug nuts had been removed. Another local fabricated a “wanted dead” poster patterned after those from the Wild West era naming two editors who worked for The Fisherman magazine. Their crime? They dared to write about the Block Island bass run. The names Tim Coleman and Fred Golofaro were written in bold, black letters on the posters, which were stapled up around the island.
“Someone out there was not happy, to say the least,” says Zambrotta, who, like me, was good friends with Coleman, who passed away in 2012. Golofaro died in 2021. One can only imagine how a “wanted dead” poster would be received in today’s world.
Zambrotta dedicated Surfcasting Around the Block to Coleman and five other friends he fished with on the island. I suspect that Coleman—a skilled surf fisherman, Vietnam vet and a gentle soul—had the last laugh. Among his Block Island catches were a 67-pounder and two 50s taken on successive casts one night.
There were many ways to lose big cow bass on Block Island. Someone might cast across your line when you were tight to a good fish. Often a big bass ran into heavy cover and chafed through your line. Or a bass might be hooked in such a way that it had leverage on the plug and simply straightened the 4/0 stainless treble hooks as if they were rubber. “Every connection is a point of failure,” Zambrotta says. “You had to make sure everything was in good working order.”
That meant fresh line and leaders, smooth drags, the best snaps and swivels you could buy, strong hooks, well-tied knots, and the regular cutting-back of line or leaders that were nicked or frayed. “I made so many mistakes on Block Island,” Zambrotta says, “but that’s how you learn.”
One thing he and others had to master was the ability to remain calm and to avoid rushing a bruiser before it was tired out. “As a young surfcaster, when I hooked a big fish in Newport, I was a nervous wreck,” he recalls. “You’d lose the fish and be so dejected. Once I got on Block, I landed so many that it wasn’t a big deal when you lost one. I’m very calm trying to land one now.”
Bob Andrade, one of Zambrotta’s good friends, had yet to land a 40-pounder and was so nervous whenever he hooked a large fish that his right leg shook uncontrollably. He’d mutter negative thoughts out loud: “I know I’m going to lose this fish.” Andrade named his right leg Thumper.
One November evening in 1985 on the island, with a gale forecast for the following day, Andrade and Thumper finally landed a 47-pounder, which Zambrotta led to shore. The two men shook hands. “When he finally landed that one,” Zambrotta says, “he was ecstatic.”
Most anglers fished needlefish plugs designed to resemble the large sand eels that swarmed in shoals and drew the bass to the island. The trebles often couldn’t stand up to the power of those big bass. Former tackle shop owner Pat Abate fished Block Island with a group of six other sharpies. They collected their bent and twisted hooks and put them in an empty peanut butter container they dubbed “The Jar of Broken Dreams.” Abate recalls that when he and his friends went out for a night’s fishing, they would carry three or four needlefish and a box of Mustad 3561E open eye 4/0 treble hooks. Abate’s group would go through 200 hooks a season. Looking at the strange shapes, it was hard to imagine the contortions were wrought by fish. “Try doing that with a pair of pliers,” Abate once told me. “You’d struggle. It was all leverage.”
When big fish were gorging on 7-inch sand eels, they often wound up with a plug’s hooks dug into the outside of their mouths—in the lower jaw or the gill plates. “It’s not that the fish were crushing the hooks,” Abate says. “A lot of the hooks were outside the mouth, and that gave them a lot of leverage. When they were on sand eels, it was rare that they would swallow the plug.”
Despite how good the bite was on Block Island, the coastal striped bass stock was not in good shape at the time. School-sized fish were scarce, a sign of trouble. A 10-pounder Zambrotta landed on the island during that period was so unusual that it garnered more attention than a 30-pounder.
Overfishing in the 1970s and early ’80s had brought the dominant Chesapeake Bay stock to the brink of collapse. Such were the circumstances that foretold the end of the Block Island heyday. A five-year moratorium started in 1985. It took until 1995 for the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to designate the striped bass stock fully recovered.
Will circumstances align again to produce another Block Island-like situation? Zambrotta is optimistic, yet realistic about how the social-media era might cause such a blitz to unfold differently. “I suspect it will happen again, but I don’t think it will be that quiet,” he says. “When Block Island happened, it lasted for a period of years.”
This article was published in the October 2024 issue of Soundings. It originally appeared in a 2024 issue of Anglers Journal, https://www.anglersjournal.com/saltwater/block-island-bruisers
