Everybody standing on the outer Cape in September is waiting on something else. The striper people want the fall run to start in earnest, the offshore people want one flat day in a row, and the whole beach gathers in the dark with coffee like a train platform where the train is late. Then the bluefish show up ahead of schedule, and every single one of those people goes back to the truck and gets a rod anyway.
A blitz on Nauset does not give you much notice. You get terns first, working tight and low over one patch of slick water, then bait showering out of the face of a wave where no bait has any business being, and then the whole trough inside the bar comes apart. From the moment you see it to the moment you should already be casting is about forty seconds. That is the entire argument for walking a mile of beach in the half dark in waders, on the chance that you are standing in the right two hundred yards when it goes off.
A bluefish does not take a plug so much as remove it from circulation. There is no tap, no thoughtful pause where you wonder whether that was the bottom. The rod goes over and stays over, and then the fish runs sideways through the school instead of straight out to sea, because a bluefish would rather cut through its own relatives than do one predictable thing. Fifteen minutes of that and your forearm is finished for the morning, and you have another two hours of light.
The other thing about a blitz is that it travels. It slides north along the bar at roughly a fast walk, which means that within ten minutes there are eleven people jogging up a beach at sunrise carrying fishing rods, a scene that from the parking lot looks a great deal like an evacuation. Plugs come back with the tail hook gone and grooves cut down the belly. A man near us landed one, set it on the sand to unhook it, and learned what everybody eventually learns, which is that a bluefish on dry sand is still very much on the clock and has opinions about your boots.
They get called oily and strong and not worth keeping, mostly by people who leave them in the sun all morning and then act surprised at dinner. Bleed one the minute it is in the bag, get it on ice, and eat it that same night with lemon and too much pepper, and you will wonder who started the rumor. The fall run came on two weeks later, the way it always does, and everyone talked about it right through the winter. The best morning of the season was the one nobody bothered to write down.
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