The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel runs seventeen miles across the mouth of the bay on a couple thousand concrete pilings, and every one of those pilings is wearing a thick sweater of barnacles from the waterline down. From a boat it is an enormous piece of infrastructure with traffic humming across the top of it. From underneath it is a vertical reef that somebody built by accident, and in August it is stacked with sheepshead doing what sheepshead do, which is grazing barnacles off concrete like goats on a hillside.
A sheepshead is an unsettling animal. Black and white bars down the side, a body built like a dinner plate that lifts weights, and then you get it in the boat and it opens its mouth and there is a full set of flat white molars in there that look like they belong to a person you went to high school with. That dental work is the entire operating system. It crushes barnacles, crabs, and small mussels, and it can take a fiddler crab off your hook with the delicacy of a jeweler and leave the hook completely untouched. People who fish for them a lot describe the bite as feeling like nothing at all, followed by an empty hook, followed by a growing sense of personal insult.
So you tie off to a piling with the tide running, drop a fiddler crab straight down along the concrete, and keep your line tight enough to feel a rumor. The strike, when you learn to recognize it, is a small tick and then a slight lightness, which is the fish already leaving with your bait. Set the hook late and you have nothing. Set it early and you have nothing. Get it right and a fish that fights like a bulldog goes immediately back into the barnacles and tries to cut you off on the sharpest structure in the Mid-Atlantic, which it will manage more often than not. Everybody arrives with plenty of hooks. Nobody leaves with them.
The captain we ran with out of Virginia Beach has been fishing that structure for twenty-some years and keeps a five gallon bucket of fiddler crabs he catches himself on a marsh flat he refuses to name. He counts breakoffs out loud in a flat cheerful voice, the way a bowling alley counts gutter balls. Nine before ten in the morning. He said if you are not losing tackle you are not fishing close enough to the piling, and then proceeded to fish so close to the piling that the boat rubbed it twice.
Around eleven the tide slacked and everything turned on at once. Four fish in maybe twenty minutes, the biggest a hair over nine pounds, all of them coming up sideways and furious and looking like they had been drawn by someone who does not like fish. They eat as well as anything that swims in that bay, which is the argument that finally justifies the hook budget. On the ride back in somebody asked the captain whether it bothers him that a fish with a jaw like that always seems to be smiling. He said it bothers him a great deal and he goes back four days a week anyway.