A fluke drift is a fragile thing. Summer flounder fishing off the Jersey Shore depends entirely on the wind and the tide agreeing to travel in roughly the same direction at roughly the same speed, and the Atlantic has never agreed with anything in its life. When it does happen, the boat slides across the sand at a walking pace, the sinkers tick along the bottom like somebody tapping a pencil, and every person on the rail becomes deeply superstitious about changing anything at all.
We were out of Barnegat on a hazy Saturday in a twenty-two footer with a bad radio and a good crew. Fluke lie on the bottom with both eyes on the top of their heads, which tells you their whole philosophy: wait, buried in the sand, until something swims over and makes a mistake. So you bounce a bucktail with a strip of squid, low rod tip, tap tap tap along the sand, and mostly you catch shorts. Dozens of shorts. Enough undersized flounder to make a person wonder whether a keeper is a rumor the state invented to move licenses.
The bite is the real problem. A big fluke does not hit anything. A big fluke simply becomes heavy, the way a grocery bag becomes heavy, and if you set the hook on that feeling the way a striper fisherman would, you will pull the jig straight out of its mouth and hear about it all the way back to the inlet. My uncle has delivered the same instruction every trip for thirty years, in the same flat voice: "When you feel nothing, wait. Then keep waiting."
Which is precisely how the biggest fish of the day ended up on the least attentive rod aboard. My cousin’s kid, thirteen, was eating a sandwich with one hand and holding the rod in the general direction of the ocean with the other. When the weight arrived he did absolutely nothing, because he had not noticed, and doing nothing is the correct technique. By the time he looked down, the fish had turned and hooked itself and the rod was bent into the gunwale. What came over the rail was a doormat, brown and speckled and wide as a manhole cover, that flopped once on the deck with the outrage of something that had been extremely comfortable a moment earlier.
We measured it three times, because nobody trusts the first measurement of a fish that size, took the photograph where the kid holds it out toward the camera at arm’s length in the traditional manner, and then went back to catching shorts for two more hours. The drift held all afternoon, which almost never happens, and we have privately decided that was the actual miracle. The kid owns a rod now, and a tackle bag, and a hat. He still says he was not paying attention. We are fairly sure the sandwich was tactical.