838 Hours

Grown men have cried over the derby. They have ignored their wives for week after week, sleepwalked through work day after day, stayed up all night long, skipped out on their jobs altogether, drawn unemployment, burned through every last day of their vacation time, downed NoDoz and Red Bull and God knows what else. They have spied on their rivals and lied to their friends. They have told off strangers and cheated like lowlife bums. If you believe the conspiracy theorists, they have prosecuted bogus charges of rules breaking to get their adversaries tossed from the competition. People have died fishing the derby. In 1993, four anglers — two fathers and their young sons — drowned when their boat sank in heavy swells on the second-to-last day of the contest. In 1947, a Boston businessman crashed his plane trying out a contemporary fad: spotting schools of bass from the air, then landing on the beach and casting away at them. A nearby fisherman rushed to give first aid but couldn't save the man. "All that," he lamented, "for an old striped bass."

An old striped bass, yes, but it's not only that. Catch a winner in the Vineyard's beloved annual fishing contest and they'll etch your name on the all-time roster of champions. You'll earn a spot in a tournament history book that starts during the Truman administration. It's something like taking the green jacket at the Masters. "I'm after derby glory," says Dave Skok, a professional fly tier and two-time derby winner. "That's what it's all about for me." For a certain class of Vineyarder (and aspiring Vineyarder), for those who haven't already made their millions and plunked them down on the massive trophy mansions so fashionable on the island today, winning the derby is as close to immortality as they're likely to get.

The conventional wisdom about modern-day Martha's Vineyard goes something like this: popular summer tourist destination; propelled into the national consciousness when U.S. senator Edward Kennedy drove off Chappaquiddick's Dike Bridge in 1969; backdrop for the movie Jaws; presidential vacation spot for Bill and Hillary Clinton; one- time address of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; host to A-list cocktail parties, yachting regattas, and presidential campaign fund-raisers; land of multimillion-dollar mansions; playground for the fabulously rich and famous, whose ranks of visitors and residents (past and present) have included James Cagney, Ted Danson, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Billy Joel, William and Rose Styron, John Updike, Art Buchwald, David McCullough, David Letterman, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, and Lady Di. All of that is true, as far as it goes. But the place is not quite so flashy as its press would suggest. The island's moneyed class has traditionally been low-key — this is not the Hamptons; one writer called its vibe "reverse-chic" — and after the summer is over these ranks seem to be outnumbered by the middle class and the working class and the anonymous.

To hang around in the fall is to see the off-hours Vineyard, the place as the year-rounders know it. The island morphs back into an isolated, tightly knit community where everyone knows just about everything about everyone else. It feels as if someone has released a pressure valve. The tourists and glitterati are (mostly) gone. The lines are shorter, the crowds thinner, the days cooler. If you're a Vineyarder earning most of your annual income during the summer season, September means the mortgage is paid, the bank account is full, you're secure for another winter. It's time to blow off steam, and for a good number of islanders that means it's time to fish the derby.

This year, the contest runs through October 13, but from the very beginning, at 12:01 a.m. on September 9, hundreds of men, women, and children are out on the water chasing the four fish of the derby: striped bass, bluefish, false albacore, and bonito. They have good reason to start early. A quarter of a million dollars in prizes are at stake in thirty-two divisions, eight each for adults, fly rodders, juniors under age fourteen, and children under age eight. The biggest catches each day earn anglers fish pins — cherished mementos people wear on their hats or hang on their walls — and, in the adult divisions, $5 to $20 in cash. The top three finishers in each class at the end of the contest take home rods, reels, and shopping bags filled with lures, line, sunglasses, and other fishing accessories. The anglers who catch the biggest of the four species from the shore and from a boat are "grand leaders," and they win $500, a heavy-duty outdoor jacket, a framed print of fishermen at the Gay Head cliffs painted by island artist Ray Ellis — and a shot at the grand prizes: a nineteen-foot Boston Whaler and the Chevy Silverado, each worth about $30,000. For hardcore fishermen, the most sought-after titles are the shore and boat "grand slam" awards for heaviest combined weight of the four species, a feat that demonstrates complete mastery of the fishery. Win one of those and you get $500, a bag of high-end fishing gear, and the undying respect of the derby world.

Three thousand people — half of them islanders, half visitors — will enter the competition by the time it ends next month, and I'm one of them, Badge No. 402. I'm here to see whether the Great Fish Gods hold me in their favor, since I'll be fishing almost every day, and winning the derby is half-luck anyway. But mostly, I'm here to see what happens when an island full of the fish-addled have 838 hours to feed their passion. Among the many people who are possessed by fish during the derby are a high school teacher, a chef, a painter, a rhythm-and-blues singer, a real estate agent, a gas station attendant, and just about every plumber, carpenter, and electrician on the island. They are men and women, fathers and mothers, teenage boys and girls. They are businessmen, doctors, and blue-collar workmen. They are fly-fishing specialists in their twenties with new high-tech gear and salty old-timers in their seventies using lures and techniques that have changed little in the past half century. The derby invades people's dreams. Fishermen have subconscious premonitions about a particular fish at a particular spot. Gangs of mainlanders — many from fishing clubs with long histories of their own — show up to fish for a weekend, two weeks, a month, the whole contest. Two fly rodders come from Italy. Teachers show up at school on an hour's sleep, and students show up carrying stinking fish they killed the night before. "It's the only time," says taxidermist Janet Messineo, "that you can walk through town and you're covered with squid gook and you smell bad and you...