I remember Pop would hustle home from work, reach for that big 12 foot surf rod and Penn Senator whose level wind required an educated thumb, and ignoring me and older bro’s entreaties, as we weren’t old enough to come, he’d vanish in the Jeep to return carrying two huge fish that represented a week’s fine dining.

… or so Ma and him thought, me and Older Bro still preferred chicken over seafood, given Mother Nature made chickens empty and big stripers full of gawd-awful smelling guts and scales that we had to shovel out of the sink and dispose of quickly.

San Francisco had quite the Striper culture I was to find out later, once I was chasing them myself. I might have been resentful at not being allowed to go as a young lad, but I understood later. Striper fishing on the West Coast being dangerous as hell, involving multiple treble hooks on foot long plugs, adrenalin filled anglers tied to rocks or perched on slippery algae forty foot above an ocean that offered a scant 30 minutes before you died of its chill. Swells between four and twenty feet, and an undertow that forced you into a constant backpedal as it took the sand from under your feet in the blink of an eye.

There’d be a whole phalanx of cars parked above Ocean Beach, each fellow sharpening his hooks or retying his knots while scanning the water from the Cliff House to Pacifica looking for the clouds of birds that signaled stripers pinning clouds of Anchovy to the beach …

There was nothing gentle about the sport, as even a minor misstep meant something barked, smashed, or bleeding.

While all those memories were reawakened by Pete McDonald’s elegant prose in “The Blitz” (Tosh Brown photography), it portrays our East Coast brethren as having a much easier time of it; shallow beaches, gentle swells and being able to stand in the water while casting.

… all of which is completely foreign to my experiences.

I’ve been a fan of Pete’s Fishing Jones blog for many years. He possesses a light, engaging, humorous style that is both self depreciating and completely infectious, and I was counting on getting a generous dose of his wit in this work.

Alas, his text is forced to play second fiddle to the photos which dominate almost all the pages, and while the photography is quite good, with the occasional spectacular, the grip-grin pictures can be tedious.

Each of the notable areas of Eastern Striperdom is treated with a short piece about the surroundings, a sprinkling of prose on the community of anglers, and a plug for one or more local guides. It’s an engaging adventure book, not intended to be a resource on Stripers and Bluefish, nor is it intended to devote reams to fly patterns and technique, rather it’s a deft narration of a year long adventure snapped in pictures.

There’s enough flies imbedded in center consoles, fly books, fish’s mouths, and hook keepers to make a pretty good reference work, and based on the samples; big, white, flashy and chartreuse, dominate most of the preferred offerings.

As a west coaster and not indigenous to the area, I was unawares of the perils facing the East Coast fishery in the Eighties, and the success story that was their resurgence a decade later. Outside of a paragraph here or there in an old book, I’d run across Lou Tabory, sand eels or lances, and knew that our West Coast fish were imported from the East via milk jug and train.  What surprised me about this book was reading of the favorable surf conditions and just how big a fly fishing following existed in these eastern byways and resort towns – and how commanding was the distribution of fish, all the way from Maine to Virginia.

An Albie liked my fly, but one of the whipping coils of clearing line caught on the edge of my wristwatch. The fish left in a hurry trailing half of a fly line – half Chuck’s fly line if you’re keeping score.

“Goddamnit!” yelled Chuck.

“It caught on my watch.”

“I know, that’s why I said ‘goddamnit.”

I tried to cover my watch with my rain jacket.

“Take that off, Son,” said Laughridge. “The only times you need to know on Harkers are sunrise and sunset.”

As we idled around for the next opportunity, I heard whistling from the helm and recognized a tune from the Wizard of Oz being performed at my expense.

I would not be a just a nothing

My head full of stuffin,

My heart all full of pain,

I would dance and be merry,

Life would be a ding-a-derry,

If I only had a brain.

Pete hints at a striper subculture commanding a following of obsessed and dedicated anglers that are only a Gierach book away from being celebrated by the rest of us. Naturally it was these dropped tidbits that I wanted to know more about – as tales of suffering and deprivation are always more gripping then us working stiffs plying our craft on weekends.

Perhaps in the sequel, and at the cost of some photos …

I’d be interested in the old pre-80’s slant, and how this new breed of angler fit in with that hoary old crowd – as guys like Joe Brooks and his ilk appear to have been involved during a similar heyday.

I’d suggest that the narrative is much too clean to be real however – throwing lead-core and weighted bucktails on 3/0 hooks in the constant inshore breeze of the beach, has to result in a good deal of maimed flesh. Nowhere in this narrative is a hint that the line is capable of filleting human flesh or that burying the barb of a large stainless steel hook in the soft flesh of an ass cheek presents an angler with but two choices … run for the car and the tender mercies of Emergency – or continue fishing as it’s that goddamn good …

This book is a fast read due to the preponderance of photography. I found it terribly interesting and terribly short of subject matter, given that so much turf is covered and the book’s reliance upon photography to assist the narrative is simply not deep enough. I found it enjoyable – yet it had me wanting to know a lot more of the people and sport, as well as its history.

Full Disclosure: I purchased the book at full retail ($49.95) from Departure Publishing. 216 Pages, 315 Photographs, 43 of which are guys holding stripers.