The fall has brought another kind review. This one is by Russell Drumm, whose 1997 book In the Slick of the Cricket tells the story of the man who inspired the character Quint in Jaws.

(All three lists also praise my buddy Christopher McDougall’s excellent bestseller about ultramarathoners, Born to Run.)

Crowd favorite Wyatt Jenkinson got on stage as one of the eight grand leaders, and while he didn’t win the top prize — a truck — he still walked home with a pile of loot and the title: He’s a derby champ. Said his dad, Patrick, who put him on the fish last week: “This is way better than winning it myself.”

Update 10/20: Video of the ceremony, from the derby site. Check out the great speech by grand-prize winner Michael Seeger in the last two minutes.

And here’s derbyite Bob Clay giving his annual remarks about what the derby means to the island fishing community. A hint: It’s not all about the prizes.

10/22 Update: The full scoop from The Martha’s Vineyard Times.

Striper Steve Pietruska’s iced-down bluefish is generating some chatter (see here and here), though nothing like the uproar over the leadbellied 57-pounder two years ago.

Meanwhile, as Wyatt Jenkinson bites his nails over his first-place boat bonito, I’m reminded of a story I heard this summer about the 2007 boat bonito race. Islander Geoff Codding won his second consecutive derby that year with a 9.14-pound bonito caught from his friend Lev Wlodyka’s boat in September. It was a smallish first-place fish, and Geoff never felt entirely secure that it would hold up. He knew better: He’d finished in second place six times over the past few years.

As it turned out, it could’ve happened again. Somebody did get a bigger fish. If only she’d registered for the derby.

Krista Martinko violated the cardinal rule of fishing Martha’s Vineyard in the fall. If you’re going to wet a line, get a derby button. The 64-year history of the tournament is choked with would-be winners who didn’t shell out a few bucks just in case they caught a big one. (See page 253 of The Big One for the ultimate beatdown: Harry Beach and his couldabeen derby record striper.)

Krista and her husband David, who are from Maryland, have been coming up for the derby most of this decade. In 2007, they were out with charter captain Kurt Freund when Krista brought in a nice bonito that topped 10 pounds on the Boga Grip.

“Kurt’s mouth dropped,” Krista recalled, “and he said ‘Please, PLEASE say you have a pin!’”

Her husband had one; she didn’t. It wasn’t until she went to Edgartown that night to weigh in her husband’s fish that she realized how big a mistake she’d made. She overheard a couple of islanders talking. “You hear about some girl who landed a 10.5-pound bone today? She’s not even entered in the derby!”

“I had to smile,” she said. “I had made the local chatter.”

Small consolation, if you ask me.

In 2007 I spent a day on the water with fishing fanatic Patrick Jenkinson and his son, Wyatt, then 9 years old (Chapter 12 in The Big One). As a fourth-grader, Wyatt’s entries went on the Vineyard derby’s junior leaderboard, but he took the competition as seriously as anyone. The day I met him, he had a 54-pound, first-place junior grand slam going — the heaviest combined weight of a striper, bluefish, bonito and false albacore. When he spotted a rival cruising the same waters nearby, he looked at me and said, “He’s our archenemy.”

Wyatt is still a junior, but the bonito he caught Monday morning is a major-leaguer. At 9.71 pounds, it launched him to the top of the main leaderboard, ahead of everybody — kids, flyrodders, grizzled veterans, rich charter-boat anglers.

For now at least, the 11-year-old is, in derby parlance, a Grand Leader.

At school Tuesday, Wyatt basked in the attention. “I told a lot of teachers,” he said. “They were amazed.”

Now comes the stomach-churning. If his fish holds on through Saturday night, he’ll have a one-in-four shot at the grand-prize Chevy Silverado. If lightning strikes (No Whammies!), he’d have to wait a little while longer to drive the truck, of course, but in the meantime he could get used to that cherished Martha’s Vineyard honorific, “Derby Champion.”

His superstitious dad — frankly, I’m shocked he picked up the phone to talk about the fish with me — isn’t doing much to help his nerves. Patrick is either preparing him for the worst sort of heartbreak, or else doing anything he can to keep from jinxing the kid. “I told him, ‘You’re going to get beat. It’s gonna happen. There are bigger fish out there. A nine pounder is not going to win this year,’” he said, wishing and hoping and dreaming that he’s completely and totally wrong. Working in their favor is the weather forecast. Big winds are called for as the derby heads into its final four days.

The Jenkinsons have been dialed in on the bonito this fall. Patrick led in the first week with an eight pounder, and he has two other daily winners to his name. One came on “Bonito Saturday” and got him a $500 jackpot.

On Monday school was out for Columbus Day, so they headed out at 7:30 a.m. in a stiff north wind. Nobody else was on the water as they got into position and cast their lines out. The way the Jenkinsons do it, Wyatt gets to fight the first fish, then they alternate. But the first one was a little bluefish, so father told son they would start taking turns after Wyatt caught a bonito, and the kid ended up with the rod when the next fish hit.

“It was a heck of a fight,” Patrick said. The first run sent the bonito right past the boat and they got a good look at it. “It was like, ‘Oh my god, I haven’t seen a big one like this in a long time.’ I says ‘This is a real one.’” He went for the net and it turned into a minor adventure. Patrick got the bonito halfway into the webbing but it shot back out and under the motor. A few hair-raising seconds later they had it on deck.

They marveled about the fish for a moment. Then, reflexively, they started talking about Wendy, Patrick’s wife and Wyatt’s mom, who died last year after a year-long fight with brain cancer. Fish like this inspire thoughts of the heavens.

“What else do we think about when something good happens, or something funny happens?” Patrick explained. “You know she was with us. It was an unbelievable moment. It was just a nice moment.”

Patrick has been fishing the derby forever. As a kid he won the junior ranks twice. As an adult he’s won enough daily pins to cover 10 hats, and he’s taken first place in the boat grand slam standings — a feat that earns lasting respect in hardcore fishing circles.

He knows better than to bank on Wyatt’s bonito. He knows how tough it is to finish a Grand Leader: He’s never even done it himself.

But juniors have been crashing the main leaderboard regularly in recent years. Molly Fischer, then 12 years old, finished atop the boat bass division with a 49-pounder in 2005. Two years later Chris Morris, an eighth-grader, caught the big bluefish, an 11-pounder, and went home with the grand-prize boat.

They ring the final bell on the derby Saturday night at 10. It can’t come soon enough for Wyatt.

“It’s probably going to be the longest week on my life.”

(In the meantime, he might consider reserving his derby badge number for the foreseeable future. Coop, the Edgartown tackle shop owner, set aside a special one for Wyatt this fall: 1234. Derby anglers are nothing if not superstitious, and that number may have mojo.)

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.

This fall, he booked a charter captain to take him out during the derby: Lev Wlodyka, the six-time derby champion whose 57-pound leadbellied striper is the central story of The Big One. What had everybody talking was that he didn’t just hire Lev to fish once or twice, but every single day. At $500 a session, morning and afternoon, you could say that Evan is invested in this tournament. The pair have been fishing dawn to dark many days — “Lev is an insane man,” Evan says — and so far the mogul is second on the leaderboard with a 40-pound striped bass.

But Evan says he’s after more than a mere derby winner. “My goal is to drum up a fish that’s older than me, and I’m 27,” he said. To that end, he’s also been fishing regularly for several years with renowned Montauk charter captain Jimmy George.

Evan’s full-service approach to the venerated derby has raised some eyebrows. Some see this as overkill. Is it right for a guy to hire a tournament legend for five weeks to try to win it all? But at its heart the derby is a tourist draw that drums up much-needed fall business for Vineyard tackle shops, hotels, bars and, yes, fishing captains. Evan wouldn’t be the first guy to win the derby on a fish he caught during a charter.

***

Me? I didn’t see any 40-pound fish during my trip. I did find a pod of nice stripers one night, and battling them for a couple hours counted as success enough for a laidback angler like myself.

I was coming at the derby fishing from a decidedly non-competitive frame of mind. The morning after I arrived, I had breakfast with a handful of recovering war veterans at the Beach Plum Inn in Menemsha. The inn’s owners, Bob and Sarah Nixon of Washington, D.C., and Chilmark, had invited the military men to the island for a few days of fishing, and Vineyarders of all stripes chipped in to help. The vets weren’t worried about winning. They were just happy to be fishing. (Check out the press here and here.)

I saw another side of derby insanity hanging around Larry’s Tackle Shop in Edgartown for several hours signing books. The guys at Larry’s see all kinds. First, a woman asked for a lure that wouldn’t catch a fish. She just wanted to attract hits, not actually catch one. Or something like that. Then a clutch of women in their 20s walked in and began perusing the selection of saltwater flies. They didn’t want to catch fish either. They wanted to cut off the barbs and sell the flashy flies as earrings at $50 a pair.

Finally, in walked a guy with a giant stuffed tiger strapped to his butt. A bright orange sticker on his forehead read “Damaged.” And he was.

“I’ve fished the derby before and the excitement that surges through town is electric. Rumors, laughter and accusations fly. Kinney’s book captures these tales of chicanery, one-upsmanship and braggadocio, and just the overall weirdness …

“The Big One is a fun, two-fisted read about the great derby, one of our cherished fall institutions.”