DATELINE: AUGUST 27, 2025 – CAPE COD, MASSACHUSETTS
Martini Arostegui was a freshman at Stanford when I met him. He was barely shaving and yet even then far more mature and responsible than I was. It has been 14 years since that fateful day on Elephant Rock, and my life has been better for it. I’ve been fishing with him and his family countless days and nights, learning far more than I had any idea I needed to learn. Along the way, I added over a hundred species and dozens of records with them, been included as part of the family for trips to the Bahamas, watched both of his parents get inducted into the Fishing Hall of Fame, watched him graduate Stanford Summa Cum Everything, get his PhD, and go to work for Woods Hole. But today was even more special. Today we would watch Martini get married.
The road to this wedding was a long and winding one. Unlike me in my 20s, Martini had a lot of responsibilities and little taste for insincere volume dating. He knew what he wanted in a partner, and it took a few years to meet Kaitlyn. It was an instant match. They had nothing but fun together, understood each other like no one else, and soon, they got a cat. We will now do a cat digression.
The original Martini and Kaitlyn cat, Roux, during his kittenhood.
Soon, they added Anchovy.
Later on came Chowder and Bean Sprout.
No roster of Arostegui cats would be complete without mentioning Rossi, Martini’s childhood pet and perhaps the greatest cat ever. We miss him still.
Ok, that should be it for the cat digression. Obviously, once they were co-cat parents, the wheels were in motion. It was only a matter of time, and one winter evening, Martini called me and told me the big day was coming – July 12, 2025, in Cape Cod.
Marta and I arranged to get to Boston two days before, so we could celebrate my birthday there, at one of my favorite restaurants – Legal Seafood.
Bearing in mind that I never think the restaurant puts enough chocolate syrup on the ice cream, Marta brought an entire bottle.
Our hotel in Cape Cod was in a campground full of airstream trailers – highly recommended.
The next day, we explored Falmouth and its many attractions – I hadn’t been to the Cape since I was a kid, and it is indeed the epicenter of New England charm. After we bought the requisite “Jaws” lunchbox, we attended a pre-wedding party for Martini and Kaitlyn.
Martini bought me that hat in 2014, as a reminder that it is the closest I will ever get to a Devil’s Hole Pupfish.
That evening, Marta and I cozied up in a local fish and chips place.
We expected to meet Chief Brody, Quint, or at least a Kennedy, but it was not to be.
The next afternoon, we put on nicer clothes and headed off to the ceremony. The wedding itself was, in a word, perfect. A lovely venue, and planned so well it didn’t seem planned at all. It was good to catch up with Kyle, of The Great Road Trip of 2014 fame, and to watch all the close friends and family come together and celebrate.
The bride makes her entrance.
It’s so nice to be at a wedding where neither person looked terrified.
I got to shout out “Dairy Queen” when someone asked about Martini’s favorite restaurant, and it also came up that Martini has more road miles with me than any other person. But mostly, Marta and I just got to sit there and admire two young people who had found their soulmate. Marta always says that I have found my true soulmate, but that she is still working on it.
Some of you were probably hoping the blog would end here, on a heartfelt note of romance and family, and that there would be no fishing. You are obviously new readers – welcome!
Since I was in the area, I had a 20 year-old bookkeeping error to correct, and I planned on doing it the next morning. It involves the spiny dogfish, Squalus acanthias, and me failing to keep up with scientific developments. You see, I caught my first spiny dogfish in San Francisco Bay, in 1992, on Captain Bill Gould’s Fury. (We miss Bill to this day – I learned a lot of what I know about fighting big fish from him.) In the ten years after, I caught spiny dogfish in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. I’m talking well over a hundred of them – and yet, I never took a single photograph because I already had the species. Or so I thought.
Imagine my surprise a few years back when, in reading A Field Guide to Coastal Fishes From Alaska to California, by Kells, Rocha, and Allen, I discovered that the Pacific creature was now Squalus suckleyi. While this did let me log a few world records, it meant that I now had an undocumented species over on the east coast. For years, despite many visits, I never found the right day to go out and get one for posterity. The day after the wedding would be the right day, and no, I did not invite Martini, because that would have been rude.
Enter Captain Eric Staplefeld of Hairball Charters. When I called him and made the request, he nearly hung up because he thought I must have been pranking him. This guy is one of the top striper and tuna guys in the area, and someone called him to catch a pest fish? But I explained my odd quest, and he agreed to do the trip, albeit still a bit bewildered.
We launched early in the morning and got chatting on the way out. He mentioned that he did a lot of big game shark fishing, especially porbeagle, which immediately got my attention, because I do not have a porbeagle and it’s one of the IGFA Royal Slam fish. I knew I would have to come back at some stage for a shot at one of the big fish. (A porbeagle, by the way, is a large shark that looks and acts a lot like a great white.)
For now, all we had to do was get into 100′ or so of water and drop some squid, but on the way out, he saw some stripers boiling in a current rip. He pointed at them, and at first, I passed. He was astonished. Calmly, he explained that these were very big stripers and would be hitting lures. He showed me some of the giant “walk the dog” baits he had rigged on some very nice 6000-size spinning outfits. Another big fish jumped, and Eric looked at me imploringly.
Sanity got the better of me and I grabbed one of the rods. I fired the lure out past the current break, and on the second twitch, the water exploded and the fish took off downcurrent. I’ve caught quite a few stripers over 20 pounds (most of them on the east coast,) and this one was clearly in that range. We drifted with it for about five minutes, and after at least two more sizzling runs, we brought it boatside.
It was all of 25 pounds, one of my top 10 stripers ever, and the guy had to talk me into it. That’s how strong species hunting derangement can be.
We caught four more over 20 before we headed onward, so for anyone sane, it would have been a great day already. But we had our mission. Perhaps five miles later, we stopped and rigged up a bottom rod with some squid. Captain Eric joked that this would somehow be the first day ever he wasn’t pestered by dogfish, which was a terrifying thing for him to say as I dropped the bait down and hit bottom.
There was dramatic silence for roughly seven seconds, and then something started munching the squid. Roughly two seconds after that, I hooked it, and after a 40 second fight, I had it in the boat.
My official Squalus acanthias, species 2402.
We stayed and caught a few more, just to really make a point, and then we worked our way in, with Captain Eric trying to find me another new fish the whole time.
I did get a large winter skate, but alas, I had caught this species in 2004.
Marta picked me up at the ramp and we had an uneventful flight home. But the story doesn’t end there. It actually ends a month and a half later, because I took that Porbeagle thing very seriously. At the end of an east coast swing that will actually be the next blog, I took the ferry from Long Island over to Connecticut, and drove back to Falmouth for an offshore day with Eric. The ferry is a huge time saver if you find yourself in the same area.
That evening, there was a schedule miracle and Martini and I got to hang out for a few hours. We talked fishing, of course – an assortment of our shared history and some great ideas for the future. Married life was going well, and they had added more cats. (The aforementioned Chowder and Bean Sprout.)
He was going out after bigeye tuna the next day, another Royal Slam fish I need to add.
Morning came quickly. It was good to see Eric, and he brought his grown son, also an Eric, with him. A tremendous fisherman in his own right, Eric Jr. was curious to meet the man who chartered for spiny dogfish.
Steve and the two Erics.
They had good intel on where the big sharks were, although things had been messed up a bit by a storm the previous week. (This storm will be covered in the next blog, which actually happens after the wedding and before this porbeagle trip. Sorry about the Marvel timeline.) But today’s weather was absolutely perfect and I liked my chances.
We motored for about an hour, well past our spiny dogfish spot and into the open Atlantic. We slowed down after a while, and Eric set up some big game rods with live mackerel. Then began the wait. I have never been accused of having even an average attention span, so I began dropping small baits to the bottom to see what would happen. Spiny dogfish is what happened. At least 25 of them during the day, probably more. It serves me right. We were also surrounded by whales most of the day – and they’re noisier than you would think, and their breath smells awful. Here’s a video:
It slowly got to afternoon, and we hadn’t seen any big fish, but the area was absolutely crawling with life – whales, porpoises, baitfish, and loads of bottom fish. Somewhere in there, I got a small hake that didn’t look quite like any hake I’d caught before, so I took photos.
As Colonel Hans Landa would say “That’s a Bingo!” It was an offshore hake, and I was up a species, albeit not the one I wanted.
As with many fishing trips, there are long periods of inactivity broken up by brief moments of chaos. Our chaos came at about 3pm, when one of the big rods snapped down, screamed out about 10 yards of line, then went dead before I could fully pick it up. Eric thought it was probably a tuna, and just as I set the rod down, the other one went totally slack and there was a commotion right at the back of the boat. A small porbeagle had grabbed the bait and swum straight up with it, never getting hooked but giving me an excellent look at him.
As it often is with the Fish Gods, that was it for the day. The big sharks were out there and I would connect with one someday, but in the meantime, the bottom fish kept at it, and one of them look pleasingly unfamiliar.
It was the much more common red hake, which I had somehow not caught previously, and I was up two for the day.
Both Erics looked at me with polite bewilderment, but they had totally bought into the species list idea and had numerous suggestions from local waters – things I hadn’t thought of, like windowpane flounder.
Captain Eric hated to go in, but I had an early flight the next day and had to be back to work. On the way to port, he made a couple of stops to try to for another species and for “a couple of quick stripers.” In California, there is no such thing as “a couple of quick stripers,” but this guy knows his stuff.
We did indeed get a few stripers, trophies by my standards but smaller than the July fish.
This is a sub-average striper for Eric. By California standards, it’s a beast.
While bouncing the bottom with some light stuff, I finished the day by pulling up my personal best black sea bass, a beast of some 3+ pounds.
No, this is not a rainbow bass.
Sunset as we got to the ramp.
It was an excellent day, one porbeagle shy of epic, but I also knew I would be back. This is one of the places the big sharks are known to concentrate, and I definitely had the right captain. All I needed was another trip, which you know is already being planned, and another perfect late summer day, which is up to the Fish Gods.
Steve
Leave a Reply