Tuesday, and continue through Oct. 15. Striped bass and bluefish are the game fish to be sought, and for which prizes are given. The derby, often called the outstanding one of its kind on the Atlantic Coast, is also the oldest, in terms of continuous operation.
The derby is known from coast to coast, and close to 2,000 entrants from 22 states attended a year ago. The present promise of good fishing is expected to bring a crowd that large or larger.
The nightly scene at the weighing-in station in Oak Bluffs, is an aspect of the annual bass derby that has never been adequately described.
The derby committee has invariably selected a place for weighing-in with ample space and the weighing-in station by night is a scene with an atmosphere of sociability and good nature. In the assembly there usually may be counted fifty to a hundred persons, young and old, fishers and non-fishers, all deeply interested and enjoying the companionship and procedure.
The curtain fell at 2 p.m. on Friday on the Island’s twentieth Consecutive fishing derby and without doubt its most successful. Up to the final hour, the fish arrived at the weighing-in station, and thus the derby ended on a high note, with sixteen bass and eleven bluefish weighed in at the final hour.
President Eisenhower, at his Newport vacation headquarters, has welcomed the gift of a Martha's Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby trophy, a Vineyard bluefish hauled from the ocean at the South Beach by Arthur W. Ben David, and presented through Benjamin F. Morton, executive secretary of the Martha's Vineyard Chamber of Commerce, and of the derby. If the baked bluefish served on the presidential table was not of succulence and fine flavor, the Newport cooks ought to be sternly disciplined.
The curtain fell on the eleventh annual fishing derby on Monday, an event that has brought the Vineyard much publicity and gained for the Island many new friends. This particular derby did not measure up to average in some particulars, although it surpassed all other derbies the Island has held in others.
Coincident with the end of August the attention of those addicts of the pastime of rod and reel turned toward the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass Derby, which ought to be called merely a fishing derby because the blues have crowded the bass in number and popularity for the past several years.
The eleventh annual fishing derby of the Island will open on the 15th of this month and it might be well to glance back along the line of history of this event and to take what old timers would have called “a severe look” at what it constitutes as of today.
With a week more to go it looks as if history will be made in this year’s fishing derby, History which may see a woman take the grand prize for non-residents, for one thing, and a general increase in the sizes of prize-winning fish for another.
This week’s sensation, up to Wednesday night, was the landing of the 45 pound 9 ounce striper by Louise deSomov of Hampton Bays, Long Island, which not only gained for her the lead among women striper fishers, but put her out in the lead among all of the non-resident class.
In all the tumult of a savage easterly gale accompanied by lashing rain, the 10th annual fishing derby came to a close on Saturday, with contestants fishing, or certainly attempting to fish up to the final hour.
Mrs. Albion A. Alley Jr. reeled in a fifty pound bass Monday night, fishing at Squibnocket, and this fish may well be a record for woman‘s shore striper fishing. The best last year’s derby could produce in this department was a twenty-one pound plus bass. In fact the resident grand prize winner, Wallace Pinkham’s fifty-five pound plus fish, was the only one in the whole derby bigger than Mrs. Alley’s.
The annual fall fishing derby offers the scientific community an ideal platform for monitoring the health of fish and for doing marine research. Gregory P. Skomal, a regional division of marine fisheries biologist, is involved in several key studies with the help of derby organizers.
Derby fishermen provide the perfect mechanism for monitoring fish. Four species of fish are weighed in almost daily, and all a researcher has to do is take his pick. And since the fish are all brought to the same spot for weighing in, it is easy to standardize.
