Stellwagen Bank is a long underwater sandbar sitting between Cape Cod and Cape Ann, left there by a glacier that had no idea what it was starting. Cold water pushes up over the edge of it, the sand lance and the herring stack up, and everything with a fin in the North Atlantic shows up to eat. On a good August morning you will see humpbacks working bait, shearwaters sitting on the water in rafts, seals doing whatever seals do, and somewhere under all of that, bluefin tuna the size of a motorcycle.
The fishing itself looks, for most of the day, like nothing at all. You set up on the edge of the bank, you put out a spread of live bait or a chunk slick, and then you wait. That is the whole activity. Boats within sight of each other, everybody quiet, everybody watching rod tips that do not move. Somebody makes coffee. Somebody rearranges the cooler for the fourth time. A whale comes up close enough to fog the windshield and after the second hour even that stops being a distraction. It is the most boring fishing in America right up until it is not.
When it goes, it goes without any warning whatsoever. A reel that has been silent since six in the morning simply detonates, and the sound is not a click or a buzz, it is a mechanical shriek that makes everyone on the boat forget the plan they spent all morning rehearsing. Two hundred yards of line is gone before anybody has the harness clipped. Somebody is yelling about the outriggers. Somebody else has stepped in the chum bucket. The captain is backing down hard and the water is coming over the transom and this, apparently, is normal and fine.
Ours ate at ten past two in the afternoon after eight hours of nothing. The mate got the rod into the belt and then went about the business of keeping four adults from injuring each other, which is genuinely most of the job. The fight lasted fifty minutes and consisted almost entirely of gaining eight feet and losing six. There is no skill on display from the angler in that situation. There is only the ability to keep pulling after your forearms have quit and started sending complaints upstairs.
It came up green and enormous and turned once on its side about thirty feet off the corner, a slab of blue and silver that made the boat feel like a rowboat, and then it did what a fish that size is entitled to do and went back down and broke off on the leader. Everybody stood there breathing. The mate wound up the empty line, looked at the clock, and said we had four hours left and plenty of bait. Nobody sat down for a while after that. It turns out the boredom is easier before you know what it is hiding.