There is a specific cold that belongs to a Maine dawn in striper season, the kind that makes coffee taste like an achievement and turns every lobster buoy into a little painted argument against sleeping in.
We idled past the granite point at first light with the standing crew debate at full volume: topwater versus soft plastic, a dispute that has outlived at least three of the boats it started on. The East Coast rule is that whoever is currently catching is currently right, and nobody had caught anything yet, so everyone was right at maximum volume.
Then the water inside the buoy line dimpled, that nervous, crowded look bait gets when something with opinions arrives underneath it. The first topwater cast landed past the nervous water, walked twice, and disappeared in a hole the size of a bucket. For one perfect minute the debate was settled, the sun cleared the point, and a striped bass tried to take the rod back to Portugal.
It was the only fish of the morning, which by East Coast law made it the correct lure, the correct tide, and the correct religion, until tomorrow, when the soft-plastic faction files its appeal at first light.
The point has heard ten thousand versions of this argument and kept every fish’s side of the story. That’s the tale we’re sticking to.