Gartside referred to him as “a dude who likes stripers and strippers.” Gartside was a sort of mentor and kindred spirit to Skok. On his website, Skok has a few words of endorsement from the late great Jack Gartside, with whom he shares a common thread of humor. One of the beer drinkers on shore tips his bottle towards the threesome and notes, “The fishing looks pretty good today.” Her boyfriend says something to Skok first, probably launching a fishing conversation he would rather not be having.
Skok looks intense, moving with stealth and purpose and seemingly focused on the water, until it becomes apparent that he’s moving closer and closer to a woman in a bikini. A couple of guys saunter down to the water with beers in their hands to watch. Undeterred, Skok scrambles goatlike down the riprap at one end of the beach, clips on his stripping basket, and begins a stalk through knee-deep water. It’s a hot summer day and there are bathers in the water and kids digging in the sand and pasty adults catching rays in their loungers. There’s no public parking, so Skok pulls into a friend’s driveway, kicks off his flip-flops, and walks barefoot down the street to the beach. He’s developed a rotation of local flats he can wade and fish for striped bass by sight, including this one, a neighborhood rife with dangerous oversized sport utes. Skok slams way more than he crashes, mostly because he knows how and where to find striped bass, bluefish, bonito, and false albacore around Boston. “Crash” means the opposite, like getting skunked. Skok has created his own fly-fishing lexicon, and in his world “slam” means catching fish until your arms fall off. He catches her eye and yells a suggestion about the color of her baseball cap, and then the moment is quickly forgotten. As she swerves around him, the woman driving the Suburban shoots him a death stare.
Skok hits his brakes and dodges right and keeps talking about the tide and the angle of the sun and the water clarity. The neighborhood streets are lined with cars, and he’s talking about fish and scanning the water out his driver’s side window so he doesn’t see the impending head-on with a Suburban that’s barreling toward us downhill.įrom my view it looks like it’s going to be crash.
We’re driving to fish one of his favorite walk-in spots. “What’s it going to be today, slam or crash?”ĭave Skok asks this question as he winds down a narrow residential street outside of Boston proper.
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