Outdoors: To boldly go fishing at Noman's, the final frontier, for bluefish

Ernie’s eyes were glued to the lubber line on the Danforth box compass, while I was on heightened alert for wakes and any noise I could hear above the hum of the reliable but noisy marine conversion engine.

We left Sakonnet on that foggy mid-summer morning convinced we’d steam out of the thick soup and into the clear before we reached the shipping channel.

That was not the first nor would it be the last illogical decision either of us made.

We were headed for Noman's, a destination we referred to as the final frontier. The fishing along our home grounds from Newport to Westport wasn’t just good, it was great.

The problem was, those catches didn’t remain a secret for long, and with success came interlopers looking to get in on a sure thing by following us and jumping our claim.

After weeks and months of employing evasive tactics, we took a break in the action to reconsider our options.

Cuttyhunk was still extremely productive but considerably more congested than when we first began to fish there in the 1960s, so I decided a trip to the distant outpost of Noman's Land might provide some breathing room, along with what we hoped might be impressive catches.

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I’ll never forget that day, and not because of the risk we took crossing the dangerous shipping lanes, but because of the fantastic catch of a mixed bag that few fishermen have experienced before or since.

The morning sun was well up in the eastern sky before it began to poke holes in the fog and none too soon. That old Navy surplus compass was dead-on, and as we slow trolled toward our destination, we heard the surf rolling onto the northwest corner of the island before we actually saw it.

Our trip was everything we could have hoped for and beyond.

We returned to Sakonnet that evening with full boxes of teen-sized bluefish, bonito, stripers up to 22 pounds and some dinner plate scup the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I was a boy.

All but the latter were casualties of our crudely constructed homemade wooden popping plugs.

Noman's is a prohibited area used as a bombing target for US warplanes, and although we never set foot on the island, we were chased off by helicopters that surveyed the island prior to the jets with live bombs and ammo arriving for the target practice that has made American pilots the finest in the world.

Up until that trip, my only experience with that distant outpost had been transitory passages along her western shoreline on our way out to the swordfish grounds.

I was never able to convince Captain Dave Brayton to loiter just long enough for me to cast a plug but the sight of breaking fish and birds working along the island's boulder-strewn shoreline always shifted me into an exciting exploratory mode.

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Whenever we were in close proximity to Noman's, I’d troll a feather or cedar plug and on several occasions, something big and powerful rose up from the depths to attack and make off with the lure and every bit of linen line I had packed onto the spool of my trusty Penn Squidder.

On one of those swordfishing trips we came upon a brace of white marlin breaching under shearwaters as they tore up bait within 500 yards of the island's southwest corner. Right then and there I made up my mind that someday soon I’d be casting my lures onto these conspicuously fertile waters.

That first voyage was the beginning of a long, exciting, and productive relationship with one of the most productive offshore locations in the entire Bay State. That first year we made elaborate plans, then continued to put them on hold as storm after storm swept across the waters of Rhode Island sound, separating us from our destination.

After weeks of disappointment, we finally received a forecast for successive days of clear calm weather.

Loaded with enough ice to build an igloo, sleeping bags and provisions for two days, we steamed out of Sakonnet two hours before dawn on a direct heading for the location.

After two days of the most exciting casting action I had ever experienced, we racked our rods and nodded. We didn’t feel it necessary to announce the end of that exhilarating yet exhausting outing; we both knew when we’d had enough.

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The drags on those Penn spinners were as worn as the brakes on a 50,000-mile delivery truck, and our cast-weary bodies would be sore for days. Yet, we smiled as Ernie pointed the boat back to Sakonnet while I began the grimy task of relieving a pile of jumbo bluefish of their innards.

That day our catch were bluefish that averaged between 12 and 16 pounds, but we saw enough of those big brown logs that followed our poppers all the way up to the boat to alert us to the presence of stripers feeding in and among the schools of bluefish.

For the second trip, I had purchased, scrounged, and borrowed a half dozen Atom Junior plugs in various stages of abuse that fooled enough stripers up to 28 pounds to alert us to the potential of our bluefish bonanza, providing us with incredible striper action as well.

In the late 1960s, the only other boats we saw fishing this location were a few 13-foot Whalers that made the run from Menemsha.

Because we made the 23-mile open-water steam in a seakindly inboard bass boat, whenever we met those boats there on some lumpy days Ernie referred to them as the Mosquito Suicide Squadron.

Although we considered ourselves striper fishermen, hooking up with freight train bluefish was right up our alley, and after a few trips we parlayed these long hauls into commercial fishing ventures, collecting the princely sum of 20 cents a pound from a harborside restaurant whose chef had a famous batter that could transform bluefish flesh into tasty fish and chip platters.

At one point during that commercial venture, I nearly convinced myself that I was actually making money.

As the number of stripers harvested began to increase, I ordered a handsome 23-foot CC with a big outboard and began targeting stripers.

Although we considered the bass interlopers in what was always a bluefish domain my tube and worm rigs along with Captain Frank Sabatowski’s handcrafted bucktail jigs accounted for some hefty seven striped fish.

What do a 54-pound striper, a 19-pound bluefish, a 14-pound fluke, a 10-pound bonito and a 4-pound scup have in common? Those fish were all caught aboard my boats at Noman's.

However, the southeast corner of the island also gave up a state-record 21-plus pound fluke for Joe Czpiega of Fall River, and I know of at least one 60-pound bass caught off the northwest corner.

A fellow club member landed a 21-pound bluefish on one of my homemade Linesider poppers and I have lost other stripers in the trophy class that had their way with me in the rocks while alligator blues of 20-plus pounds won their freedom by breaching and spitting the plug back in our direction.

Noman's is a place often heard of but seldom seen, yet this westernmost of the Massachusetts Islands is still one of the pre-eminent places to break the 20-pound bluefish mark and the boulder fields on the southwest corner is the best place to toss an oversized popper.

F-15 jets no longer make strafing runs here, but the island is still off-limits to any type of landfall, so don’t even think of beaching your boat and taking an exploratory stroll among the unexploded ordinance.

Charley Soares writes outdoors and fishing columns for The Herald News of Fall River, Mass.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Outdoors: FIshing at Noman's Island, the final frontier, for bluefish