Arnold Laine: A Legendary Striperman

To the south, from down toward Head of the Meadow way, the cold fog is rolling up the beach. It had been hanging just offshore all day, now it starts to move in from over the Peaked Hill Bar, then northwesterly up and over the sand and dunes that brace the land behind them. It rolls up the beach between the dunes and the wash like a living thing, enveloping everything in its path like a hungry monster. In a matter of minutes, it goes from a warm and sultry evening with a clear sky to a swirling mass of gray, cold and wet vapor that limits the visibility to mere yards.

The tide is low, and there is little water between the ebb tide mark and the outer bar, where a gentle swell rolls easily over from the outside edge. A lone buggy with wood-paneled sides and a rusted hood is parked in a hollow between two higher dune peaks, and from it the haunting sounds of a classical music piece played on a wind-up turntable penetrates the fog and is carried along the backs of the water droplets. Next to the buggy, a 10-foot wooden skiff with a 3-horsepower outboard motor attached sits on the sand. Inside the buggy, one of the Cape Cod surf legends is relaxing, awaiting the flooding tide. The striped bass that will come with it and be borne over that shallow bar, to where he will be waiting in that skiff in the swirling fog, anchored just outside the bar.

Arnold Laine was a commercial striped bass fisherman, pure and simple. With no false pretense, no bravado, he quietly went about his business for over a decade, putting more bass on the beach than any of his contemporaries. In today’s world he would likely have been subject to scorn and ridicule. But when Arnold Laine prowled the Cape shores from Bourne to Provincetown, commercial striped bass fishing was not the contentious issue that it is today.

Arnold’s chosen method was somewhat more of a challenge than dropping nets over the side of a steaming dragger or haul seining. In 1937, the Massachusetts State Legislature made it illegal to net striped bass for commercial sale. The only legal means to commercially harvest stripers was with rod and reel.

He chose to work the beach, to live on the sand and hopefully profit from his chosen vocation. He had no interest or desire to do anything else but that. By all accounts he was a quiet and unassuming man, honest and somewhat shy. He was small in stature but huge in heart, and when it came to fishing for stripers, he fished the hardest, the longest and would brave any conditions night or day to catch bass.

In Frank Woolner’s various works on marine sport fishing, you will find many references to Laine. It is obvious Woolner had a great deal of respect and admiration for the man beyond his fish-catching abilities, and much of what we know of Laine we know from Woolner. In a way, he created, or maybe a better term would be perpetuated, the mystique of Arnold Laine. Surely Laine was a fabulous bass fisherman, but outside of a very few select friends and without the benefit of Woolner’s work, would we regard him with as much reverence as we do today? I think so, especially among the hardcore surfcasters who were and are familiar with the time and place. He holds a special place in the history and lore of striped bass fishing on Cape Cod and his story should be told.

“Better at Striper Fishing than Anyone…”

In conversations with those who knew Arnold Laine, there is a common thread in all the descriptions of his exceptional skill at catching striped bass. Dick Samms of Truro, Massachusetts and New York City, was a contemporary of Laine’s and fished with him many times. He told me in one phone conversation that Laine had “an almost mystical ability to know where and when he could catch bass.” He was “better at it than anyone” he ever met, said Samms.

In fact, he was so good that he was the target of controversy in the Schaefer Cup Tourney point tallies of the Worcester Striper Club, of which Arnold was member. His being a commercial fisherman was broached by a member of a competing club who knew of Laine’s abilities. Even though just about everyone sold whatever fish they could not eat in those days, Laine, rather than fight the controversy, just decided to forgo contributing to the club’s catch totals. The Worcester Striper Club retired the cup trophy after three consecutive wins without Laine’s help, but just the same it was an unfair protest and most likely the product of jealousy more than anything else.

Woolner states in his 1972 work, Modern Saltwater Sport Fishing, “Arnold Laine, (was) probably the greatest rod and line commercial striped bass fisherman who ever lived,” and “he was good enough to boat approximately twelve thousand pounds of bass during each season, working day and night from mid-May through October.” In the same work, he relates how Laine had a total disregard for any “elemental fury” and gives as an example fishing through a thunderstorm with Laine. The thought of six tons of fish year after year may be repulsive for some, but when you think about it, it was a truly amazing feat. The tackle at the time was anything but sophisticated; at the start of his career it was Burma cane poles, linen lines that had to be dried after each use and revolving-spool conventional reels. Traveling the beach was daring in constantly overheating vehicles that should have long gone to the bone yard, most without four-wheel drive and with wheels cut and welded onto larger rims to accommodate larger tires. Rigged eels, eel bobs, tin squids and cut baits were the basics before plugs built for the task eventually were developed and made their way to the beach. I wonder if today’s fishermen could put up with the effort involved just to get to the beach back then?

It is not known how many big fish Laine put on the beach. Fifty-pound-plus fish have always been tough to find, but it is a pretty reasonable assumption by most that he put a phenomenal number of 40, 50 and even a few bigger bass on the scales of the fish markets on the lower Cape.

Today, along the wind-swept shores of Cape Cod and other coastal communities where the striped bass swims, the debate of commercial versus recreational striped bass fishing rages on at a fever pitch. In the telling of Laine’s commercial bass fishing days, I do not seek to glorify, endorse, nor decry the commercial fishing aspect but only to acknowledge his skill. In Arnold Laine’s day it was looked on as an admirable way to scratch out a living from the sea, and in doing so you could fulfill several objectives at once. You could make money at it, you could be your own boss, and for someone who loved to fish more than anything, you could have your cake and eat it too. For Arnold, a machinist by trade, this must have seemed much better a proposition than spending all his time in a machine shop.

A Striper Innovator

The striped bass population explosion of the late 1930s, coinciding with most available able-bodied men being away at the war or in shipyards and factories pumping out the equipment of victory, made the whole plan come together for Laine. When the war was over, if one had tried to pick a better time to go to the sea and try the life, 1946 had no equal. So, for the better part of a dozen years, Arnold Laine toiled to make a living from the sea from beach and boat, along the sides of the Cape Cod Canal, and just about everywhere in between.

Arnold was a thinker, described to me as very intelligent and self-taught. Surely his skill as a machinist and his woodland skills honed back home in the hills surrounding Templeton, Massachusetts, trained him to assess the natural world and to use what he learned. Always thinking of new ways and solutions to problems at hand, as Frank Woolner recounts, Laine had a hand in many developments on the striper front. Many surfcasters know of the Bob Pond’s great Atom Reverse plug, and if you have ever used one and noticed the two holes drilled in the end of the plug to let water in and make it tail heavy for better casting, thank Mr. Laine.

Scents have recently become very popular in bass fishing along our coasts. Scent-impregnated plastic eels, jellies, sprays and oils are all available to give us the edge over the next guy and bring more bass to the boat or beach. Woolner and Lyman, in the 1954 edition of their collective work The Complete Book of Striped Bass Fishing, tell the story of Arnold Laine concocting a scent “of several highly secret oils and essences including the extract of rare old eel.” Laine soaked his plugs in it and believed strongly that it helped to improve his catches. Seems he was ahead of his time.

In fact, in the late 40s, after Bob Pond had switched to plastic for making his famous Atom swimmer, Pond marketed a version of his P-40 Atom plug that came with a molded-in scent chamber, a bottle of “Arnold Laine’s Secret Bass Scent” and instructions on its use and application from Arnold himself. Today that model Atom is highly prized by collectors and is known as the “stinky plug.”

In an article I wrote for the January/February 1997 issue of On The Water titled “The Worcester Connection,” I related the tale of Leo Perry and Arnold Laine “confiscating” the “Entering Orleans” sign from the side of Route 6. They then cut it in half to make sand sleds to carry the many fish they took north of the parking lot at Nauset Beach, inshore of the Gorilla Hole. Anything was fair game when it came to getting bass to the market!

Stan Kuzia of Sagamore, Massachusetts, fished with Laine on many occasions also, especially around the banks of the Cape Cod Canal. Stan told me how Arnold had come up with an eelskin rig so deadly he would only let others see it if they swore secrecy. Stan said it indeed did out-fish any other rig at the time. Arnold made his own plugs as well. He called them “beaver cuttings.” I have one plug in my collection that may be one of his, but I have never been able to locate anything to compare it to and validate my suspicions.

“He knew just how far he could go, which was always a bit farther than the other guys…”

One of Arnold’s favorite methods to take bass from the beach was to launch his skiff into the surf at dusk and row or motor out to the outside of the bars at Peaked Hill in Truro. Anyone who knows this area knows how dangerous a proposition this could be. Imagine it’s dark, a ground fog has settled in, there is a four-foot swell coming in over the bar, and you are in a 10-foot wooden skiff with a 3-horsepower vintage 1940s motor on it. No lights save a flashlight and only an anchor to keep you from heading to Portugal. From all accounts, however, Arnold was not given to reckless behavior, as someone might assume from this scenario. Rather, he was a master of the calculated risk. Tony Chiarappo of Truro described it to me as “supreme self-confidence, he knew just how far he could go, which was always a bit farther than the other guys.”

There are many accounts of him doing it. Dick Samms saw him do it, the Perry Brothers saw him do it, and Woolner saw him do it as well. He would take along a sheet of plywood 2 feet wide and 4 feet long to lie on and rest until the tide was right, and then he would fish eels or plugs from the skiff. Dick Samms told me of one morning when he saw Laine come ashore with 34 bass. The skiff was almost sunk, and 12 of the 34 fish were strung on the anchor line as he couldn’t take anymore in the skiff. His average take was six or seven, all 30 pounds or better. He started a craze of sorts, and others, like Jimmy Andrews of Eastham, joined him in their own skiffs. Eventually this practice became the norm for the beach gang, but Arnold was always the first out and last in. When most would not dare clear the bar and because of this were unsuccessful, Arnold was on the other side, sometimes less than a hundred feet away, bailing fish into his skiff.

“The realities of his calling…”

Many people who had the chance to fish with him told me he was always courteous to other anglers who happened upon him on the beach when he was catching fish. Unlike some others, he wouldn’t try to cover up how well he was doing and in fact would invite the interlopers to join him. He was just a really nice guy they all say, and many have favorite memories of those times when they were able to fish with Arnold Laine.

Laine had grown up hunting and fishing the woods near his boyhood home in Templeton. He was by all accounts an experienced woodsman and an excellent fly-fisherman, skilled in the art of fly-fishing for trout. He made many trips to Maine with the Woolner brothers to fish for the wild brook trout that grew large in virtually untouched Maine woodland streams and brooks.

Arnold Laine lived the life that many of us have dreamed of from the mid-1940s to the late 50s. Once he got the bug, he lived and breathed striped bass fishing. He was his own man, making his way on his own terms. Unfortunately, the realities of his calling caused him to have an epiphany of sorts. It just plain didn’t work. The hours, effort, relatively short season and sometimes risk involved compared to the return in dollars just didn’t add up. After 12 years Arnold called it quits, retreated back to his hometown of Templeton and took up his old trade as a machinist at Starrett Twist Drill in the nearby town of Athol.

He couldn’t get the salt and stripers completely out of his blood though and made occasional trips to fish the Cape Cod Canal, but he never fished the beach commercially again. He was one of the greats. In my office I have two pictures of him on my wall, one is of him and a young Dick Samms on the beach in front of Jimmy Andrew’s skiff, with Samms holding up a 50-pounder caught by Laine the night before while Laine looks on smiling. The other shows Laine standing on the beach with two cows in his hands and seven more large fish laying before him with his buggy in the background. He was one of the best striped bass fishermen that ever lived. He made his reputation in little over a decade, and it still lives on today. He was a commercial bass fisherman but also an innovator and a pioneer in the sport of surfcasting, and if ever there was such a thing as a true legend in striped bass fishing, he was certainly it.

This story was originally published in the March 2008 Issue of On The Water Magazine. The author, Steve Shiraka, a “legendary striperman” in his own rite, passed away in 2009. Photos courtesy Tony Chiarappo and the Townsend Family. 

Source: https://onthewater.com/arnold-laine-a-legendary-striperman

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