Boat Fish Don't Count

The wild, obsessive, dangerous pursuit of Montauk's biggest striped bass

- Tyler Austin Harper

The wave comes, throat-high and hungry. The last thing I see before it sweeps me off the rock and into the ocean is a man in a wetsuit leaning his shoulder into a wall of water.

When we swam out here around 2 a.m. and hoisted ourselves onto the algae-slick face of a boulder, he had warned me: "If you go in here, it won't be fun." And he was right.

I manage to keep hold of my fishing rod, and I'm reeling in lost line and treading water and trying to forget all the stories I've heard about sharks as a second large wave begins sucking me up its face. By the time the third crashes over me, I've abandoned any pretense of swimming back to our original perch. Sputtering and coughing, I make my way toward another rock closer to shore. A last wave pushes me onto it, and I get my feet under me.

Thirty yards in front of me, having held on to that sloping rock through the entire set, Brandon Sausele makes a long, arcing cast into the pounding surf.

SAUSELE IS 27 years old. Shaggy-haired, tattooed, and muscular, he is a devoted practitioner of an extreme sport known as "wetsuiting," which is both easy to describe and impossible for the uninitiated to understand. When I was first getting into the sport a few years ago, the advice I received from another fisherman was simply: Don't.

Wetsuiting is a form of saltwater fishing that involves wearing a wetsuit and wading or swimming out to offshore rocks almost exclusively at night, often during storms to access deeper water or faster currents than can be reached in traditional waders.

The quarry are striped bass, a fish that migrates every spring, mostly from the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, to as far north as Maine, and back down again in the fall.