Eastern Tides

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 9 SEP. 2002

The herds of striped bass that run along Cape Cod every summer have been a mainstay of commercial fishermen along the Northeast coast, as well as a lure for sporting fishermen. A machinist turned vocational teacher, Daignault was so taken with the sport he made a sort of vagabond family occupation out of school vacations, fishing the years of striper plenty in the 1960s and '70s from the beaches of southern Massachusetts. Casting single lines for fish from the shore through the night, Daignault, his wife and daughters worked 20-foot rods to catch striper bass that ran as large as five feet and weighed 50 pounds, often gathering 500 pounds of fish in a night. This catch earned him enough cash to stretch a schoolteacher's income over a growing family. Early on in his summer experiment, Daignault's "vacation job" as commercial fisherman clearly became his life's occupation, and the colorful band of Cape Cod striper fishers his trade union. There is a sort of Cape Cod Family Robinson quality glowing in this working-class memoir (Daignault's third account of his halcyon summers on the striper coast, following The Trophy Striperand Twenty Years on the Cape), which may warm readers not ordinarily interested in angling as a family passion.