Hi-Mar

Hi-Mar is not a word. It is an address, shortened the way men shorten the name of a place they are at every day: Highlands Marina.

The marina had been John "Johnny" Sciortino's landing before it was anybody's marina.^[1] By the late 1950s it held about a dozen six-pack charter captains and about five open boats, and it held a cocktail lounge, which is the part of the dock this story starts in.^[2]

In 1960 a group of those captains founded a fishing club at that bar — Sciortino, Ruett, Beatty, Coles, Moro, Cirello, Quackenback and the Renzo brothers — and named it for the dock they were standing on.^[2]

Sixty-five years later the club is still meeting. The dock is not there.

It grew to about 35 members and met monthly in the marina.^[2]

What a club like that does, mostly, is weigh fish. Its contests were sponsored by Schaefer Beer, because in New Jersey in 1962 almost everything was sponsored by Schaefer Beer, and in 1967 its members took a patch home as state champions of the 21st Annual R. J. Schaefer Salt Water Fishing Contest.^[2] The scales they weighed on were sometimes the ones at Bahrs, down the block.^[2]

None of that is remarkable. Every shore town had a club with a patch. The reason this one is worth a page is what the men in it knew, and what they did with it forty years later.

They fished a specific piece of water and they fished it constantly, which over a couple of decades produces something that looks a lot like research.

The bass ran the rips off Sandy Hook and the shoals at Flynn's Knoll. The Shrewsbury Rocks were a routine run. The Mud Hole was the deep water. And the methods that came off those boats — worming for bass, livelining bunker, chunking the Knoll, trolling plugs through the Sandy Hook rips at night — are the methods the rest of the coast eventually copied.^[2]

Read that list again and notice what two of the four have in common. Livelining and chunking are both ways of fishing with bunker. Menhaden. The oily, bony, uneatable little fish that everything else in this bay eats.

Which is how a fishing club ends up in a fight about a fish nobody eats.

By the late 1980s the bunker were going into reduction boats — industrial vessels that take menhaden by the ton and render them into meal and oil — and a man who wanted a few dozen for bait could not reliably find them in Raritan Bay.

In 1988 a Hi-Mar member named Len Fantasia, who had been driving to Great Kills on Staten Island to get bait, took the case to the New Jersey Marine Fisheries Council with the Jersey Coast Anglers Association behind him.^[2]

What he asked for was not a ban. It was a line. The small local bait operations were grandfathered in close to shore, and the reduction boats were pushed out and made to carry a B on the hull — so that anyone standing on the beach watching a big boat work the bunker could tell, from the sand, which kind of boat it was.^[2]

That detail is the whole posture of these men in one letter of the alphabet. They did not ask the state to watch the water. They asked the state to make the water legible, and then they watched it themselves.

The fight ran another 14 years.

On the sixth of January, 2002, Governor DiFrancesco signed a law pushing the reduction fleet three miles offshore and leaving a bunker corridor inside state waters.^[2]

What came back came back fast, because it had never been the water that was empty. The bass came in behind the bait. So did the tuna. So did the whales, on a bay a lot of people had written off.

A fishing club got that done. Not a foundation, not an agency, not a campaign with a logo: about 35 members of one marina club, a regional anglers' association, and 14 years.

The Hi-Mar Striper Club meets in a VFW hall in Port Monmouth now, a few miles west of the dock that gave it its name.^[2]

Johnny's Landing is a restaurant. The Highlands Marina is a different marina. The open boats sail from behind a New Deal breakwater a mile west of where they were tied up when the club was founded. The bar the whole thing started in is gone.

The club is 65 years old and it is still weighing fish.