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| One mans experience spear fishing off Montauk Point
Note: Names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty
I’ve “encountered” Billy Boy Baloote* many times in the past. Actually, I kinda like him. I’ve never known a guy who loved his job more or did it better. He would give his own mother a ticket. He is a legend in Montauk, a myth really, until you actually encounter him, then he becomes all too real. He is cagey and crafty, known to trip you up and make you contradict yourself and rat on other people. He has been known to make people sing like canaries. In short, there is no beating Billy Boy. Don’t even try. He has written more tickets than any other Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Officer in Suffolk County history. Fisherman and hunters alike fear him across all of Eastern Suffolk County.
Cut to last fall. A local friend of mine in Montauk is an avid spear fisherman. He told me how magnificent spear fishing was in the fall when archers of fish are moving past Montauk, gorging on the abundant baitfish before they travel west, or to wherever they
go for the winter. Having fished Montauk off and on my whole life, I of course was interested to see it from a different perspective: under water. I wanted in, not necessarily to spear a big Striper, (which, given the opportunity, I would probably do to the outrage of the conservationists,) but more to take in the magnificent swimming patterns of the fish. To see them trapping, herding, then feeding on smaller disoriented baitfish. My friend made it seem like I would have my own little Discovery Channel right off Montauk. I envisioned being surrounded by schools of migrating Bonita, Blue fish and Striped Bass… and if I was lucky, I’d even see a lone 50-pound cow lunker bass cleaning up after the rest. How wonderful. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity!
So I stopped by my friend’s house. We geared up with weight belts, wetsuits and masks. My friend insisted that I put the wetsuit on before we got in the car. I remembered thinking that I would look cool, kind of James Bond-ish perhaps. Instead, even though I had worked out all summer, I felt incredibly fat, self -conscious and remarkably “un-sexy” in the stupid thing. Since black neoprene attracts heat, it was also HOT! To cap it all off, I had to jam my fat butt along with 2 other guys into the front of my friend’s white van. What is it about a white van that reeks of trouble?
On the way to the point, my friend told us that, since it had just rained, we were not going to go off the beach in front of the IGA where he usually goes. He had just had an incredible experience the day before, spearing a 40-pounder. It’s always the day before. Because the tide was slackening and the water would be clearer, we would try to go off the point under the lighthouse. This wasn’t a good surprise.
Weren’t there lots of surfcasters there in the fall? I remember it being packed, shoulder-to-shoulder with fisherman only a few days before. Wouldn’t they be angry with us for disturbing the water where they were trying to fish? And certainly more important to me, wasn’t there a very real chance that one of their lures, barbed and razor-sharp, would snag me, penetrating my wet suit and lodging into my skin indiscriminately ripping my flesh? Ouch!
I was about to raise my concerns about these potentially dangerous lures when my friend started in about the current and how if it “catches you, you must go with it some, but make sure you keep paddling in towards shore. If not, you could be swept out to sea.” And if you didn’t stay by the orange safety dive flag that he would be carrying, you stood the possibility of being run over by one of the many boats that race around looking for pods of feeding Blues and Stripers that trap bait close to shore. So now the surfcasters where not my only concern.
While these terrifying situations battled with each other in my mind, my friend went on to babble something about how he was interested in killing three Striped Bass (the allowed legal limit for three people spear fishing). But he quickly added, “If I get all three fish, you guys just say you each got one. This way we are not breaking the law.” I was so preoccupied with the thoughts of racing currents, speed boats over head, and flying lures with razor- sharp barbed hooks that I agreed to his preposterous plan; temporarily forgetting my last encounter with the notorious Officer “Billy Boy Baloote”. On the trek from the parking lot to the beach at Turtle Cove, I felt fat, scared and ridiculously conspicuous.
In the fall, Montauk Lighthouse is packed with tourists, a lot of them are Asians armed with cameras. And here I was encased in neoprene, lugging a huge spear gun. I had no real interest in spearing any fish; I just wanted to see the ecosystem at work. I truly wanted to see the rocks, and the baitfish that try to elude larger predators. I wanted to see nature at work in all of its savagery. I also wanted to see some of the topography of the bottom that I, and thousands of other fishermen have been casting over for hundreds of years.
As it turns out, one of the guys was not even going to get in the water. But my friend still wanted to use him as one of the “guys” for our “three fish quota.” One fish each was legal. Again, I should have taken issue with this, as my friend, though a genuinely nice guy, god bless him, was and is an idiot.
The plan was to enter the water at Turtle Cove and let the slow moving incoming current usher us around the point and to the other side underneath the concession stand about 200 hundred yards west. If I got a fish I would take it in as instructed. If he got two, he would give me one fish to take so in theory, we wouldn’t be breaking the law. I could care less about spearing a fish. Actually, my spear gun wasn’t even loaded. I just wanted to survive the adventure.
Though I was once a certified diver, I had forgotten the most basic techniques in snorkeling. For starters, you should always back in to the water when you have flippers on. I forgot this and on my second step into the cold late-October water, I fell on my face. If the one hundred or so tourists and surfcasters didn’t see me fall, then they certainly saw me attempt to stand up in the three inches of water and an occasional crashing wave. I simply could not stand up. For starters, my mask, which I suspected right away was too big for my narrow gaunt face, was full of brackish brown water. Every time I attempted to stand another wave would knock me down. This was not soft sand either –I landed rather on unaccommodating stones. Although it hurt, I was smiling at what a spectacle I must be. Spear gun and all. Finally after several attempts, I aborted my efforts to do the enter gracefully. I gave up on saving face, and rolled over on my belly and sort of crawled out into the water on my stomach like a Walrus. Five agonizing minutes later, I reached deeper water where I could actually swim.
I could not see a thing; the water was murkier than I anticipated, and my mask kept filling with water. Every time I started swimming I had to stop to adjust my weight belt - it seemed to be drowning me. Did I have to use so many weights? The reason for a weight belt of course is to get you to the bottom quicker but was I going to stay there and drown? Every time I stopped to empty the water out of my leaky mask, I would drift farther away from my friend, who swam on strongly ahead of me carrying with him the orange safety flag. He apparently could care less if I got lost or even crushed by a large cargo freighter Not only was I swimming for my life, trying not to drown, I kept anticipating the hit of a razor-sharp lure and the obligatory second or so it would take for the angler on the other end of the line to realize he was on to something. In his excitement, he’d try to set the hook that would surely penetrate deeply into my skin---I was not having fun. This was not the aquatic adventure I had hoped for. This was hell.
Nevertheless, I persisted. I would dive down to the bottom, swim through the murky water, 15 feet or so. I have never been good at that since my ears always hurt. But I did not see one of the promised “Achers” of Bass or other game fish.
When I surfaced, I could not see the orange safety flag anywhere. I was truly terrified. Having had more than enough of this torture, I began to swim for shore. I did not want to go by the point with all the surfcasters but as I started to swim in I realized that I had no control. I was at the mercy of the ocean currents. I was being pulled around the point whether I liked it or not.
I guess the guys on the rocks weren’t casting their rods much because there wasn’t much bait in the water, hence no big fish. Although I didn’t see any lures drop near me, in the back of my mind, I know it would only take one wiseass to take aim at me. Just as I was entertaining the horrific thought of a surfcasting sniper, my friend’s orange safety flag came into sight. I started for it and swam as hard as I could, finally catching him. I was exhausted but he was less than thrilled to see me and told me not to dive too close to him. Then he handed me a thirty-inch Bass and told me to take it to shore.
Landing on the shore was possibly more humiliating and painful than my inauspicious entry into the water. Each time I tried to stand up, I either slipped on a slimy moss covered rock or a wave crashed into me and threw me into one of the many boulders that line Montauk Point. Finally, I dragged my bruised frozen body out of the water along with the measly thirty-inch Stripped Bass that I would never have considered keeping if I was on my own boat.
Instantly I had a crowd of tourists ooing and ahhing at my catch. Cameras were snapping. “How did I catch it?” “Did I really spear it?” I was so cold that I could not have answered them if I wanted to. Looking down at my feet I saw that they were incredibly blue and swollen. Every step hurt.
Dragging the fish, the spear gun, the heavy weight belt and flippers, I began the long walk of shame across the rocks back to Turtle Cove, about 200 yards. There was no avoiding the lined up surfcasters. They seemed oddly melancholy and indifferent to me. I think I hated myself more than they hated me. It was as though they collectively thought “we can’t do anything worse to this guy than he has already done to himself”. No one said a word-- I felt like a disgraced soldier walking past the enemy troops on the way to solitary confinement or some other awful fate.
My feet where killing me. I finally got off the rocks and I walked up the pass to the parking lot. Suffice it to say that my head was in a very bad place. All I could think about was getting that awful wetsuit off my frozen, chubby body.
I got to my friend’s white van, sat on the back bumper and began to peal off the wetsuit. I was trembling -- chilled to the bone. Just when I thought that things couldn’t get worse, someone called my name. I looked up to see a police truck with the unmistakable smile of DEC Officer Billy Boy Baloote peering through the windshield. Once again I new that any encounter I had with this guy -- somehow, some way -- was not going to be good.
But I remembered the story my friend had instructed me to tell and I would stick to it. I speared one fish and that’s what I had. ONE FISH. No guilt here! I walked up to Billy Boy’s truck confidently, but still I knew somehow, some way, I was doomed.
Holding fast to the fabricated story I was instructed to tell, I told him that I had only this one fish and I was not sure what my friend got. I was obviously nervous. As I babbled incoherently to the good officer, my friend and the other guy appeared with two more fish. But the one guy was fully clothed and dry. It was obvious that, unless he had just blow-dried his hair, he hadn’t gone in the water. Now we had a problem: Three fish and only two guys in wetsuits. The math didn’t work. Baloote summoned my friend over and told me to go back to the van.
Two minutes later, Baloote called me over and asked me why I had lied. Apparently my friend fessed up to spearing all three fish! WHAT ABOUT THE PLAN!!! Baloote stuck me with a $250 ticket for “aiding and abetting.” Apparently my “friend” did not stick to the predetermined story and by being honest and rightly taking all the blame himself, he ended up getting me, once again, “Balooted.” He didn’t even offer to pay for the ticket.
It was not a fun day.
Now, I ‘m on the good side of the law. Knowing that getting caught again could land me in jail, I never even considered trying to sell fish again. I even told Officer Baloote that I had an addiction to selling fish, showed him my boat and car and asked him to pull me over whenever he could; just to keep me straight.
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