The derby spent the fourth week of the competition weathering its semi-annual was-it-cheating-or-was-it-not controversy. A decade ago they dealt with frozen bait inside a first-place fish. Two years ago it was a pound and a half of lead. This year: a fistful of ice cubes.
Steve Pietruska, a retired Fall River fire chief and part-time commercial fisherman known as “Striper Steve,” showed up at the weigh station in Edgartown Monday night with a bluefish that weighed 13.86-pounds. Since it slid into first place, a derby official cut it open to check the stomach — standard operating procedure for combating cheating — and found the ice.
The chunks didn’t weigh much, just 0.11 pounds. But they were enough to make a difference between first and second place. Flyfisherman Tom Rapone led with a 13.81-pounder. The derby kept the fish off the leaderboard, and scheduled an interview with Steve at the Old Whaling Church on Saturday morning.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Steve told me Friday as he drove down to the Vineyard for the meeting. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
During an hour and a half of grilling before the committee, Steve said he could have been unintentionally responsible by jamming the fish into his ice cooler — not just once, but many times as he showed off the fish during the day.
The tournament brass decided on Saturday to disallow the blue because of Steve’s “failure to remove all particles of ice from the cavity of his fish.” They did not disqualify him from the competition, because they could not prove he stuffed the ice in the stomach. But they could not let the fish stand, since the ice could not have been inside the gut when he caught it.
While Steve may have been trying to keep the fish fresh — and prevent it from losing precious ounces before weigh-in — “it is the responsibility of the angler to bring a fish to the derby scale without any ice that may add additional weight to his catch,” tournament president Ed Jerome wrote in a statement. He said the committee had “insufficient evidence to prove intent to deliberately increase the weight of the fish, so no further action is to be taken.”
That’s significant, because Steve is already on the leaderboard with a 44-pound striper he boated on the first cast of the first morning of the derby. That fish stays atop the boat bass division, and unless some other fish tops it Steve gets a shot at the grand-prize truck.
Steve told the committee he wasn’t so worried about the prizes.
“I told them it’s not about the money. It’s not about the truck. It’s about my reputation,” he said Saturday after the decision came down. “I think they came to a fair way of resolving this.”
The ruling was a surprise, and is sure to generate fierce debate in island fishing circles. Many derby fishermen argued that it’s impossible for ice to end up in a fish’s gut accidentally, and they expected Steve to be branded a cheater and thrown out of the tournament. In years past fishermen have been banished for stuffing entries with baitfish — both fresh and frozen. In 2007, though, derby legend Lev Wlodyka was not disqualified despite weighing in a fish filled with 10 pieces of lead. The tournament concluded that Lev’s 57-pound striper ingested the weights by eating “yo-yo baits” — pogies rigged with lead. (That was the central story of my book, The Big One.)
Steve told me caught the blue at 10:30 a.m. Monday on pogy chunks near the Elizabeth Islands. Afterward, he packed it in the ice in his cooler.
“Bluefish when you first have them in the boat, he’s one nasty little fish,” he said. “He’s chomping. They’re constantly swallowing. He popped the lid open. It’s possible — maybe he ingested some ice in captivity. I don’t know.” He said he took it out several times and then jammed it back in head-first.
“Maybe I did do it unintentionally by forcing it down into the cooler so many times,” he said.
But later he added: “I still think the fish swallowed it.”
The Larsens gave Striper Steve his nickname. Years ago when they needed bass for the family fish market in Menemsha, they found a reliable supplier in Steve. His biggest striper weighed 64.8 pounds, caught on Cuttyhunk’s Sow and Pigs reef. He swears — “I’m not shittin’ you” — he caught five 50s from a boat one day off Squibnocket. He’s supplemented his fire department income over the years by selling stripers, scup and sea bass.
Steve registered for the derby once before, but this was the first year he really fished it. In earlier years he had had a trouble fitting it in with work. This year he retired at age 60, and he decided to finally give it his all. Fishing almost every day, he has weighed four stripers that won daily prizes. One of them netted him $500.
Now that he’s been cleared to continue, he’s getting back out on the water.
“I can tell you right now, I will put long, hard days in. I’m going to go out and catch a bigger one.”
10/14 Update: Steve returned to the weigh station Tuesday night with a blue that just missed Grand Leader status. It weighed 13.71 pounds, one tenth of a pound off Rapone’s flyrod bluefish. Presumably it came in ice-free.
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I am going to be politically incorrect and state my opinion–bluntly.
It is absolute bull….that a live bluefish would swallow ice cubes in a cooler. It is bul….that a bluefish, being jammed into a cooler headfirst would be forced to swallow an ice cube, either alive or dead. The gullets of even the largest bass and blues is a muscle, and a tight closed structure… either when the fish is alive or when dead and rigor mortis sets in.
That an experienced fisherman would state these hypotheticals as explanation for ice cubes in a fish gullet impugnes him.