Three winters ago, on a cold December morning, Capt. Pat Foster was slow-trolling for striped bass off the Virginia Beach oceanfront when he got a big bite. “The fish hit hard,” he recalls, “then it just stopped.” At first Foster thought he had a trophy rockfish, until the line started screaming off the reel.Before he could clear the other rods and turn the boat, all of the line on Foster’s Penn 113H Senator was gone, and with it, his fish. Foster scratched his head, wondered with awe what had stolen his tackle, and then went back to rockfishing.A few miles away, Ken Neill was trolling for stripers in his 31-foot Albemarle, Healthy Grin, when he got a big bite too. “It didn’t last long,” Neill chuckles. “The fish took everything.”Over the next few hours, the VHF radio crackled with chaotic reports of other skippers facing similar ...![beach-bluefin-03]()
