The Cape Cod Canal is not a river and it is not really the ocean. It is a seven-mile cut through the shoulder of Massachusetts with the entire Atlantic trying to get from one side to the other twice a day, and the water in it moves at something like four knots when it means business. There is a paved service road down both banks, riprap boulders the size of kitchen appliances between that road and the water, and a railroad bridge at the west end that looks like it was built by people who expected to be judged on it. You fish the whole thing from land, which is the part visitors never quite believe until they are standing on the rocks in the dark.
Striped bass in the canal are not scattered. They are wherever the current has decided to stack the bait, which can be a quarter mile from where you parked, and that is why the Cape Cod Canal is the only striper fishery in the world with a serious bicycle culture. Everybody rides. Old mountain bikes with rod tubes bolted to the frame, milk crates zip-tied over the rear rack, plug bags balanced across the handlebars. When fish break the surface somewhere down the ditch, thirty people get on thirty bicycles at once and the service road sounds like a parade going the wrong way.
Our crew got schooled by a retired mail carrier out of Bourne who has fished the east tide there since the Carter administration and calls his bicycle "the boat." He does not sprint at breaking fish. He explained this to us at 4:40 in the morning while eleven people pedaled past him toward a commotion a half mile up. "That is the tail end of it," he said. "Stay here. It comes to you." Then he drank his coffee like a man with nothing at stake.
He was right in a way that felt personal. Twenty minutes later the water in front of us went from moving to boiling, mackerel spraying out of it like somebody had kicked over a bucket, and the first pencil popper landed in the middle of the mess and got eaten before it finished the second sweep. Hooking a striped bass in four knots of current is less like fighting a fish and more like being attached to a departing bus. You do not gain line. You walk down the bank with it, over the boulders, in the dark, trying to look casual.
The fish came up onto the rocks somewhere past the light pole we had been using as a landmark, thirty-something inches of green back and silver sides with the current still pulling at her tail. We got a photo, a wet sleeve, and a slid-back release. The mail carrier caught two more without moving his feet. There are fisheries where the equipment matters and fisheries where the tide chart matters, and then there is the canal, where it is mostly about not chasing.