wasted in an estuary. With the turning of the calendar page to APRIL my excitement, that low hum of background energy, jumped up an octave. Surely a few fish would be appearing now. The date of the 15th couldn't be THAT magical. I visited the bridge nearly every day. The marshgrass turned green with new growth, the water cleared from the snowmelt runoff. The estuary itself seemed to hum at a higher pitch, and was still mine and mine alone. On April 10th I saw a flock of terns, the first of the year, circling hopefully over the eddy below the bridge. On April 12th while standing in knee deep water, swinging a streamer through the run, a school of sand lances, four inch, pencil thin and transparent passed under my rod. I almost panicked. My imitations, based on the winter resident minnows, were all wrong. On April 13th, the parking lot still empty to me alone, fishing in bright, truly warm sunshine above the bridge on an incoming tide, my eye caught surface movment to my left, and in a single frozed second, I saw the turn and flare of a double dorsal fin, the lead fin erect and spiked, the second soft and webbed. STRIPER! Then, just as quickly, nothing. I immeditely cast and popped and streamered, but the eddy just hummed as before, but with promise. The morning of April 15th I pulled into the parking lot at dawn. Still empty. The tide was outflowing, surging through the pilings. I waded onto the sandbar, stripped out my shooting line and cast the shooting head across the main flow, feeling the promising weight and pull of it's swing through the channel. On the second cast the rod pulled down and line surged out, notching my finger. I fought the fish onto the sandbar and stared down at my first striped bass, gleaming green and pearl and layered with stripes, 17 inches long, a chunky 2 1/2 pounds. I paused maybe a second. One fish, hell. I wanted 170. Two more times, as terns now dove regularly, my rod bucked down, then the water went dead, the terns flew out toward the ocean, and my casts just swung and lightened into the backflow. But I did walk back to the car with three schoolies. April 16th I couldn't break away. Medical school could make demands even I could not ignore, but I was back at daybreak the next day. There were 15 cars in the parking lot, each of them foundering, salted out hulks with sagging mufflers and tailpipes, a combined dependable range of maybe 50 miles between them. My Olds Cutlass, hardly new but basically intact, looked out of place. The Harvard and Harvard Medical School
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