Block Island’s North Rip surges and churns today off Rhode Island just as it has for millennia. Swells from the Atlantic scrum with the tides of Block Island Sound, battling along a mile-long sandbar that eventually drops away into 120-foot depths.

For surf casters, this is hallowed ground. Where the bar rises to meet land at Sandy Point, a washing machine of whitewater creates the perfect hunting ground. Bass, bluefish, false albacore and bonito patrol the drop-offs, preying on baitfish disoriented by this upwelling of currents. Heave a big popper or tin into these waters, or double-haul a Clouser, then hang on. Except now, it is unfishable.

Sure, you can still make the long walk over cobble and sand, past the stately granite North Lighthouse, and stare in awe at the foamy rip and hissing breakers that beckon you to cast. But you will not be alone. Chances are, about 100 seals will watch your every move.

When a full-grown adult male gray seal targets your catch, you better reel with all your might. These “horseheads” can reach 900 pounds and swim 20 mph.

For the past few decades, seal numbers have dramatically risen throughout coastal New England and points south. A 2019 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study noted that numbers of gray seals at haulout sites more than doubled from 2005 to 2015. Cape Cod, Massachusetts, alone now supports an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 of them. On Block Island, grays began showing up several years ago along with harbor seals, and their numbers continue to grow each year.

In some ways, the return of seals is one of the great American conservation stories of the past half-century. A combination of bounty hunting — Maine and Massachusetts once paid out $5 for each seal killed — and entanglement in commercial fishing nets drove numbers to near extinction in U.S. waters by the early 1960s. The passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 safeguarded all seal species, along with whales and porpoises. Seals responded in-kind and began recolonizing from Canada and northern Maine, slowly spreading south. Today, they are routinely found well into New Jersey, as well as beaches and rockpiles in New York City’s five boroughs.

With breeding success, however, comes growing pains, and anglers now find themselves in conflict with a fellow fisher that outguns them in every way. Gray seals can swim more than 20 mph and can dive to 1,500 feet. The big males, nicknamed “horseheads,” weigh up to 900 pounds and reach 10 feet in length. And all are equipped with a mouthful of teeth designed to grab and shred. Even their molars are fanged. Your Van Staal is not competing with that.

Consider what happened a few years ago at Block Island’s North Rip. I paid little mind to the seals loafing in the shallows when I launched a 9-inch bone-colored Doc seaward. The lure soared in a long arc, swaying back and forth before touching down and skipping off the top of a wave. A gorilla bluefish exploded from the foam and grabbed the lure midair, taking it down in a beautifully violent strike. I heaved back, felt the rod surge and heard the reel’s drag surrender yards of line. I settled in for what should have been a long, delicious battle.

Halfway in, the bluefish began jackknifing wildly on the surface. The ocean surged in a terrible heave, and something yanked the fish beneath the waves — straight out of a scene from the film Jaws. Moments later, a quarter-ton gray seal came up with the bluefish — my bluefish — in its maw, the tail and head hanging limply out of both sides. I pulled back as hard as I could, hoping to free the fish. Prying a gazelle from a lion would have been easier. The seal dove, dumping 50 yards of line as an afterthought. With no other choice, I snubbed down on the reel and broke off, losing the fish, leader and my $20 lure.

Fishing spots that haven’t been overtaken by seals are increasingly rare in the Northeast.

Something else was lost, too. A spot I had joyfully fished every fall for a decade-and-a-half was no longer mine. It now belonged to the seals. Some may see this as a sort of comeuppance — Mother Nature reclaiming what once was hers. I get it. But there was something unnatural about it, too, with the seals keying in on surf casters’ catches for their next meal.

And I don’t blame the seals. They are doing what evolution has taught them: seek out the weak and injured. A hooked fish matches that perfectly. But sometimes a released fish does, too. A friend recently spotted two dead bass in the 30-pound class washed up on a beach with their tails gnawed off. Were they set free by anglers only to be taken by opportunistic grays? Not sure. What I do know for sure is the three filleted striper carcasses I found on another beach a few days later — fish in the 25- to 40-pound class and clearly bigger than the 35-inch limit — were killed by selfish humans who should know better.

Since the first seal incident, I have revisited the North Rip a few times and caught a handful of fish, but each cast is made with trepidation. Growing numbers of cruising seals seem ever more emboldened. Hook a fish, and you better crank it in as quickly as possible with the very real fear that a big horsehead is about to eat lunch. On my last trip, a friend let a bluefish take one run too many and wound up reeling in half a fish head. At least he got his lure back.

My experience on Block Island is far from isolated. I have read anglers’ posts on various online message boards, and they are increasingly grim. Cape Cod’s National Seashore — once the sacred haunt of such legendary surf casters as Tony Stetzko, who beached a world record 73-pound striper there in 1981 — is devoid of anglers because of seals. Fly rodders are giving up on Nantucket’s Great Rip and its false albacore for the same reason. A friend’s annual trip to Brewster Flats to sight-cast for stripers, organized through a local fly shop, has been permanently canceled due to seals.

Seals may be the bane of surf casters and other anglers, but most of the public adores them. There are seal-watching cruises, annual seal counts, seal plush toys, seal T-shirts and so on. Imagine the public’s response if a state or federal agency announced a seal cull. There would be outrage on par with the outcry from Japan’s horrific Taiji dolphin hunt, chronicled in the 2009 documentary The Cove, which won an Academy Award. All of this carnage just to satisfy some anglers who want to fish for stripers? It’s not going to happen.

How about sharks keeping seals in check? Yes, great whites are visiting New England more frequently, and beach-going tourists on Cape Cod are occasionally treated to a Discovery Channel moment when a seal becomes shark food. But with low reproduction and a slow maturity rate, great white numbers would need sudden, orders-of-magnitude growth to make a dent in the seal population. And more sharks mean increased potential for encounters with swimmers and surfers.

This leaves us anglers with one option: coexistence. The world is full of inconvenient wildlife. Elephants raid farmers’ fields; tigers kill livestock; alligators eat poodles. Hell, bluefish eat stripers (and vice versa). How we tolerate seals is up to us. Do we accept and adapt to their presence? On Block Island, I have largely ceded my beloved North Rip to the marine mammals who were there first. Because to my mind, there is no other choice. And there are plenty of other places to cast.