By day, Tyler Harper teaches environmental studies at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. By night, he dons a wetsuit, often during storms, and heads out into the turbulent surf to fish for striped bass. It's an extreme sport known as "wetsuiting." He wrote about the dangerous, secretive world of extreme fishing for The Atlantic.
Evan Kleiman: I'm eager to find out about this wetsuiting. What exactly is it, and what drew you to it?
Tyler Harper: Wetsuiting is a form of surf fishing for striped bass, which involves wearing a wetsuit, as the name implies, which allows you to access deeper water than traditional waders, which will fill up. And so you're usually either deep-wading or often swimming to offshore rocks in the ocean to fish from, that let you access a little bit deeper water and faster currents, where hopefully you can reach some bigger fish.
And what drew you to it? Was it a dare?
No, I've always been a very serious fisherman. When I started fishing for striped bass, I became really obsessed with it very quickly. And soon learned that very serious people were wetsuiting and that kind of thing appealed to me. It mostly takes place at night, which is also a little easier to make happen around my work and family schedule, so it immediately appealed. Although I'm an academic, I suppose I have a bit of an adrenaline streak so that that factor appealed to me.
That's the part that just makes me insane in my mind. It's bad enough imagining myself swimming out to rocks to fish but the nighttime thing, wow. That is extreme. Tell us a bit about the history of the sport. How and when did it originate?
Wetsuiting began in Montauk, New York, in the 1960s and quickly took off in Montauk, which for many decades, remained the epicenter of the sport, but also spread throughout New England pretty quickly as well. Now, it's relatively popular. I say relatively. I mean in the grand scheme of things there are not a lot of people doing this. But you know, it became more popular throughout the Northeast.
Do you only fish for striped bass? Are you looking for other kinds of fish too?
At other times of the year, I do some freshwater fishing and fly fishing and so on, but the wetsuiting is just for striped bass.
Let's talk about striped bass. What's so special about them? Do they have a particular migratory pattern that lends to catching them by this activity?
Striped bass are a migratory fish. They arrive in New England, let's say early May. They tend to depart in late October, early November. You know, I think they are special fish in a number of ways. They have large tails, which allows them to swim in really rough surf conditions and even tropical storms and hurricanes. So they have a feeding advantage when the water is really rough. And the big striped bass are nocturnal. They like storms and inclement weather.
So the best fishing is generally when it's the most unpleasant out. They’re really challenging fish to pursue for that reason but they're also a really remarkable animal. There's something quite incredible about fishing the front edge of a hurricane, and the water looks like there certainly couldn't be anything living in it, and yet there are striped bass feeding with abandon.
Take us through an evening of you going out there. Tell us what happens in a more granular way.
Sure. Partly that depends on what kind of territory you are fishing. If you are fishing in Maine, we have a varied topography. I don't just fish in Maine. I fish in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, too. In some places, you're fishing from cliff faces or ledges where you're not actually in the water. Often, you are fishing from offshore sandbars that you are wading out to. Other times, you're fishing in what we call boulder fields, which are boulder strewn parts of the coastline where you are swimming out to these offshore rocks that you can fish from.
The average night, striped bass, they feed in ways that are pretty tide-dependent. So when you start fishing is often dictated by the tides. In general, I would say I'm usually leaving to go fish sometime around nine or 10 at night, usually getting back, two or three in the morning. But if the fishing is really good, sometimes that's fishing until the sun comes up. Myself, I try to fish four nights a week, five, if I can.
It's one of these things where you really have to go all in or it's not worth doing. Striped bass are what we would call pattern-dependent, which means they're going to be at a specific place at high tide for a very specific reason, at a specific place at low tide for a very specific reason. Those reasons are pretty hard to figure out unless you're fishing a ton. So it's the kind of thing where you need to be going a lot to figure out where the fish are, and the returns are exponential. The more you fish, the better you're going to do, generally speaking.
Brandon Sausele wears a wetsuit and wades or swims out to offshore rocks in shark-filled waters — almost exclusively at night. Photo by Peter Fisher.
I'm imagining you out there, let's say, in a boulder field, standing kind of precariously on the edge of one of the rocks. After you manage to catch the fish, you haven't schlepped a creel or something to put it in or a cooler with you have you? How do you get the fish back to where you can pack it away?
Oh, one of the interesting things about this sport is that most of us who wetsuit, I would say 99% of us catch and release everything. It's really just about the experience. The other piece of this is that most of us are fishing for trophy class striped bass. Really large fish and striped bass are regulated by what's called a "slot limit," which means you can only keep fish within a certain size, length, roughly 28-31 inches.
Most of the fish people who are wetsuiting are targeting fish in the 40-inch plus range, generally speaking. We often don't catch smaller fish as well, but the size fish that you can eat are generally not the size fish we're targeting. And most people who do this are pretty conservation minded.
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the least dangerous and 10 being the most dangerous, where would you rank wetsuiting?
It's certainly not as dangerous as something like free solo mountain climbing or something like that but it's definitely more dangerous than your average fishing. The parts of it that are scary are actually different than the parts of it that are risky. Being out on a sandbar 150 yards offshore in the middle of Maine's white shark season, the fog rolls in, and it's really quiet and it's just you up to your chest, it gets spooky very quickly. But in the grand scheme of things, the risk of a shark attack is probably really minimal.
The risk of getting caught in a rip current and drowning, or you've been fishing for five days straight, and you've got a cumulative, you know, 15 hours of sleep over those five days, and then you have to drive 45 minutes home, those are the risks. People have died during the sport. The risks are more associated with, I think, drowning and driving than, you know, toothy critters in the night. But, yeah, it's certainly not without its risk. If I had to put a number on it, I'd probably give it a 7.
The striped bass population collapsed back in the 1980s and you write that many people think we're on the verge of another collapse, if we're not there already. Can you speak to that a bit?
Yeah, absolutely. The striped bass have been historically pretty poorly managed, and they're being very poorly managed right now. The governing body that manages them, because they're a migratory fish, it's called the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which has the very tough job of navigating stakeholders who have very different interests.
You have recreational fishermen like me, who are trophy fishermen, who mostly catch and release everything. You have recreational fishermen who are meat fishermen who are catching fish in the hopes of feeding their family. You have commercial fishermen whose livelihood in no small part, depends on harvesting this fish. Striped bass represent, quite literally, a multi-billion dollar industry.
They're really hard to regulate for that reason because everyone, people like me, for example, would love to see the striped bass declared a game fish, which means they can't be harvested or sold for food. But then, very understandably, you have other folks who make their living on this fish, so it's really hard to please everyone. For that reason, the ASMFC has tended away from heavy-handed regulation, which it's looking like is increasingly necessary.
There have been a lot of poor spawning years for the striped bass related to a number of factors — pollution, climate change and so on — so it looks like they're considering some emergency measures right now. I hope they take it seriously, because this has happened before, in the '80s, and it would be a shame for history to repeat itself.