The Jersey City Independent "

Photo: Steve Gold

For most people, fishing calls to mind any one of a number of images, from the quiet solitude of nature as in the film A River Runs Through It, to the eternal struggle portrayed in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, to the harrowing adventures seen on The Deadliest Catch.

But add to those images gigantic tankers, low flying planes and helicopters, water taxis, ferries and pleasure boats, and, of course, the Manhattan skyline, and you have a better picture of fishing in Jersey City. Though hardly the pastime you would imagine here in the concrete jungle, our city is full of fishermen and women. The Hudson River even plays host to the Manhattan Cup Tournament, the largest catch-and-release tournament in the Tri-State area.

On any summer night the Owen Grundy pier outside the Hyatt Regency Jersey City is populated with people fishing. Most of them are residents, but visitors get in on the action as well — visitors like Louis Pierre from Edmonton, Alberta. Pierre travels from his home in Canada to Jersey City every couple weeks for work and stays at the Hyatt for about four days at a time.

“I’ve been checking out the guys [fishing on the pier] from the hotel room, and I thought, I got to try this,” Pierre says as he casts a fly across the surface of the Hudson. He acknowledges that a fly fishing rod is probably not the best equipment for fishing on the Hudson, but it’s what he uses back home.

At the end of what Pierre describes as a bad day, he finds fishing an excellent way to relax. “The hook is in the water and I’m going to hope for the best,” he says with a smile. “I got a good sangria to drink. I’m happy.”

Fishing certainly is about relaxing, but it is also about bonding between fellow fishermen. From the Twelve Disciples to fathers and sons, something about fishing — perhaps the fact that it involves a whole lot of sitting and waiting — brings people together. And that is certainly the case here on the shores of the Hudson as well.

Take, for example, Marlon and Mike, two Jersey City residents, fishermen and friends. They’ve been coming down from their homes in the Heights to the banks of the Hudson River to fish together for more than five years, often several nights a week.

At dusk on a beautiful Tuesday evening in August the two men have the entire pier in Jersey City to themselves as they set up their rods (Ugly Stick brand). Marlon, an African-American formerly from Brooklyn, has one pole and Mike, a Jersey City lifer of Italian-American heritage, has two; both are equipped with baitrunners to allow for a little give if and when a fish grabs the line. “His is like an automatic car, mine is like a stick shift,” Marlon explains, pointing at the rods.

To the east the moon is rising over Lower Manhattan and the wind is strong, but the boat traffic, which was heavier earlier in the day, has subsided a bit, save for the occasional tanker and booze cruise. The big boats that make their way up and down the river don’t bother the men; they explain that size of the ships combined with the relatively shallow depth of the Hudson create a situation wherein fish must bank to either side, thus bringing them closer to the shore. When the tankers aren’t there to help, however, the movement of the tides (some fishermen swear by an incoming tide, others outgoing) brings the most fish.

It has been raining for weeks, but that didn’t stop Marlon and Mike from coming out — they’ll fish in any weather. Their preference for the winter months despite the bitter cold and snow speaks to their desire for their most coveted prey, Striped Bass.

And yes, if they reel in a fish of legal size (28 inches is the minimum length for Stripers), they do eat it. “If we catch any Stripers we do,” Mike says. “Bluefish, we don’t like them.”

But it is it safe to eat fish taken from Upper New York Harbor at the mouth of the Hudson?

Marlon and Mike say yes, energetically explaining that the fish don’t just stay in one place. “I know the fish don’t just live right here,” Marlon tells me. “When it gets cold out the Stripers come in, they want the cold. And then they leave.”

The New York State Department of Health seems to agree with the prognosis of our local fishermen, to a point. Though it is safe to eat fish from the Hudson, the department advises that one should not eat more than one meal per month of most fish, Bluefish and Stripers included, caught in the Hudson.

The risk in this area comes mostly from pollutants such as PCBs that were dumped into the Hudson further upstream by manufacturing plants in the mid-twentieth century. As recently as 1976 all fishing was banned on the Hudson due to high levels of PCBs and it is only within the last decade that the river has been deemed clean enough to eat from.

On this particular evening, after four hours of waiting, Marlon and Mike began to talk about calling it a night, acknowledging with a slight air of disappointment that the fish just aren’t biting. They split the last of their bait — this night they’re using Bunker, a filter feeding fish that they caught several weeks prior by casting out treble hooks to pull the jumping fish out of mid-air as they swam to escape one of their many predators.

“The only thing that sucks about the summertime, as opposed to the winter time,” Marlon tells me as affixes the last bit of Bunker to his hook, “is right now we’re feeding the crabs. The crabs are really hitting you, taking your bait.”

Perhaps the bait is to blame, at least in part, for the lack of action. “We don’t like it when it’s frozen.” Mike says of the Bunker that he had been storing in his freezer until they needed it. “It’s gotta be bloody.”

“That’s our motto,” Marlon adds. “You gotta get blood on the pier.”

It was an unlucky night. Though the weather was beautiful, breezy and perfect for relaxing on the pier, the fish just weren’t biting. But no matter. “Those times that you do catch something, or even get a good fight, make all the other times when you don’t even get a bite worth it,” Mike tells me with a grin. “You get a good story.”

And it is precisely these stories, perhaps even more than the relaxing and the bonding, that fishermen crave, and if you get a picture, well, that’s worth a thousand words.

On the same pier, a few nights later I met a man with plenty such stories and a few pictures as well. Mikey, a Chinese native who moved to New York and then Jersey City over 35 years ago, was not fishing when I stopped to talk with him but he had his rod and his tackle box fastened to his bicycle as if he might.

“Not tonight,” he told me. It was too hot; there would be no fish. But the heat and humidity did not stop him from coming out to the pier to sit and relax by the water, and to tell fishing stories. He proudly produced a photo of him holding a 40 lb. striped bass he had caught in the spring.

Mikey’s lived a full life. He emigrated from China, lived in several European countries including Holland and Germany, and owned a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan. But the way he talked about his catch made it appear that it was clearly one of his proudest accomplishments, and he carried the picture around as a token, in the event that he may get to share it.

The relaxation, the friends, the fight and the stories — for these Jersey City men there’s nothing better. Fishing is a ritual; as it is for characters in a David James Duncan novel so it is for Jose from Newark who comes to Jersey City with his friends to fish on the weekends, and for Sam, who’s recently decided to try his hand on the Hudson, fishing for Bluefish off of Grundy Pier. It’s a solace for Louis, the fly-fisherman from Alberta, and a bonding experience for Mike and Marlon. It’s a way to step outside of the hustle and bustle, never more necessary than in our corner of the world. It’s a time to spend time with close friends, to share in both cooperation with and struggle against nature and, in the end, if you’re lucky, it’s the beginning of a great story.

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