More fishermen are coming: the Vineyard community, sportsmen and local businesses are pooling their resources to greet the Monday arrival of five men and two women who were recently seriously injured during military service. The veterans are coming to fish the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby, now entering its second week.
What better opportunity to bring out the best of the Vineyard than to share a local passion with those who have served their country?
They come looking for adventure, excitement, travel, challenge — the reasons that bring some fishermen to the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby are the same reasons some soldiers give for joining the military. But for those men and women who have been at the adrenaline-drenched war front, it is a long and welcome way to the quiet waters of Martha’s Vineyard, where the battle is with the fish.
“There’s my hero,” said Martha’s Vineyard Surfcasters Association president Janet Messineo as Emanuel Thompson walked into the Beach Plum Inn on Thursday morning. It had been a day since Mr. Thompson, an Air Force veteran from Virginia, had caught his derby-leading 34.72-pound striper on Capt. Buddy Vanderhoop’s charter boat Tomahawk out of Menemsha, but he was still beaming.
The idea came from an eight-year-old Chilmark boy. Three years ago young Jack Nixon was reading journalist David Kinney’s book The Big One, the hot new fishing read of the summer that year about the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. As Jack was reading, he gazed at a newspaper nearby and had a sudden thought: He wished that some of the men who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan could fish the derby.
Well over 1,200 fishermen are registered in the first week of the 66th annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. In the first five days of the contest, as much as 2,500 pounds of fish has been weighed in and, as in the past, the contest landings are leaning heavily towards the bluefish.
