It’s time to say farewell.

For 59 years, the Vineyard has been a second home. For many of those years, it was at the home built by my mother and father in the early 1960s on Quitsa Pond. More recently, it’s been as a guest/tenant of Deb Hancock and Dick Burt in Menemsha.

This year, I’ve decided not to return, primarily because of the condition of the striped bass fishery. Fishing has called me back to the Vineyard every year for the past 15 years. (Not generally during the derby, however. I don’t consider fishing a competitive sport.) No longer. I hope last year was an aberration, but I fear not. It was a continuation of a years-long decline in the quality of the resource. I treasure a short video I took off Squibnocket Point five years ago in which one of my closest friends, near total exhaustion, explains why it was the best day of fishing in his life. I haven’t seen anything like that since. I treasure the memory of casting a crab fly to a 40-inch fish in three feet of water and watching the fish take the fly. What a fight. I am sure this experience is still available. But the opportunities are now so few and far between that it no longer makes sense to make the commitment to try.

I can’t say with certainly why the bass population has dwindled. I suspect it is a combination of changes to the ocean currents caused by global warming combined with overharvesting of the resource. I support action to counter both.

To those who have been injured by what Adam Zoia did to our former property, I can only say I’m sorry. Perhaps we should have done something more to protect the land. Honestly, I had no idea he could do what he did. (We were told we couldn’t construct even a small guest house on the property. The idea that a new owner could build a 15,000-square-foot mansion with associated large outbuildings was simply inconceivable to me.)

To those who have welcomed me and my fishing partners — thank you. Deb, thanks for taking care of Nancy and offering up your wonderful Bridge House. Dick, your cottage is totally charming. Don’t change a thing! Marshall and Katie, please keep those photos coming from the Texaco station on Facebook. Bucky, you’re the best fly fishing guide on Martha’s Vineyard. Thanks for the many trips with me and my friends.

There’s plenty I will never forget. The whale off Philbin Beach. The leatherback turtle off Gay Head. The great blitz of 2006, when three of us spent three days with hardly a break in the action. The solitude of Dead Man’s flat and the adrenalin rush of seeing a large fish pushing a wake across it. The ride home across Devil’s Bridge after the wind came up unexpectedly. The mouth-watering taste of a Humphrey’s doughnut. Drinking white wine with Michael. Watching Craig Kingsbury walk barefoot into anything. Following Capt. Donald Poole through the inner passage of Devil’s Bridge. Picking lobsters at Pooles. That one, glorious fish that I caught with Ed Belain.

I hope this is only farewell and not goodbye. I dream of days to come when I will hunt big bass again on the flats. When marauding bluefish are as far as the eye can see. But someone will have to call me to tell me to come back. Otherwise, I’ll be elsewhere, and my dreams of the Vineyard will fade.

Jamie Harrison
Eagle, Colo.