To understand just how extreme the extreme sport of "wetsuiting" can be, consider the advice Tyler Austin Harper was given by a fellow fisherman about taking up the sport: "Don't." As Harper explains in a lengthy piece for the Atlantic, wetsuiting is a type of saltwater fishing that was popularized off Long Island's Montauk in the 1960s. Practitioners don a wetsuit and head out to offshore rocks—some submerged waist-deep—in the dark to try to reel in striped bass. The biggest stripers, which can run longer than 4 feet, like to skirt the shore at night looking for prey, particularly during poor weather and sea conditions. If climbing on slippery rocks in rough seas after midnight doesn't sound perilous enough, consider one more present threat: sharks.
Harper, who spends as many as 80 nights a year wetsuiting, traveled to Montauk to go wetsuiting with one of the best: 27-year-old Brandon Sausele. The first night, they're out from 8pm to just before 5am. They don't catch any stripers, and while "Sausele stays on that slimy boulder like he's glued to it," Harper recounts being thrown into the surf over and over. It's a blast. "Wetsuiting can feel illicit, almost juvenile," he writes, "courting danger while the rest of the world sleeps." If it sounds like madness, Harper is quick to admit it is. And yet ... "When you feel the bracing hit of a 30- or 40-pound striped bass after six hours of futile casting ... and you're trying to hold your rock and hold your rod and weather the sea that wants to claim you until suddenly, as if by magic, you see a tail the size of a broom head spraying water at your feet—in that moment, the months of pain are all worth it." (Read the full story here.)
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