A Surf-Smashed Home With History

A Surf-Smashed Home With History

- William Sisson

It’s nice to have a place to return to year after year, through thick and thin, from childhood and the teenage years to your single-minded, hard-fishing adult decades and into whatever lies beyond.

For me, that place is a mussel bar in southern New England, a piece of a larger topography — a current-swept, surf-smashed mess of sand and glacial rubble that produces terrific, challenging fishing. I have explored the nooks and crannies of this terrain for 50 years, and I am still learning.

Not only does the place remain special after hundreds of trips, but it is still a good location to tie into a large striper from late September through November. I fished it as a youngster, surfed it as a teen and got to know the bottom well, gliding over it while hunting fish with a speargun.

Hundreds of locations along the coast bear the generic name “mussel bar.” The nice thing about this piece of water is that it has a past, present and future. It holds plenty of good memories, and the fishing this past fall was excellent.

Last September, the mussel bar was on fire. The remnants of a tropical storm had passed offshore, and the waves rolled in crisp and green, waist- to head-high. Whenever a big set broke, schools of discombobulated peanut bunker shuddered in the white water like tiny sitting ducks. The bass went nuts, thrashing the surface as they fed. Three casts, three fish. Repeat.