“Step forward while the light and shadows are still clear,
the sun, low on the water, still steady.
Enter the moment you seem to be living in.”
Carl Dennis

The full moon was a few days off, and steady 2- to 3-foot swells rolled over the empty point. I’m drawn to this long stretch of surf, sand, glacial debris and wind whenever cracks appear in my world.

I’d lost two friends this fall, and my earliest fishing mentor passed the previous year. I was starting to wonder if this was a random patch of rough water or whether it foretold something more about my future. An hour earlier, I sat on my tailgate, pulled on my waders, put my headlamp around my neck and hit the sand. My idea was to find a beach log to lean against while pondering the recent loss of my friends. Maybe I could make some sense out of it. Reflect, think it through. Take some notes.

I hiked for more than a mile until I came to a rocky section where I often fish. I leaned against a boulder and watched the surf break across a bowl. To my right was a large, glacial erratic named for another missing friend. To me, it will always be Tim’s Rock. I imaged the two of us frequently fishing together once I retired. Now casting from this perch, I tried to pull up memories of him only to discover how much of the past has escaped through my scuppers since the last time I stood here. Later, I realized that I am five years older than Tim was when he died in 2012.

Fishing and reflection go hand in hand.

I studied the surf. The sun was about one finger above the horizon, and conditions looked good. The tide was flooding, and the waves were about to build. The water was clean, and this spot looked to become fishier after nightfall. I had two choices. Sit and ponder … or fish.

I am nothing if not my father’s son. I know how my Yankee forebears dealt with loss. They grieved quietly, then moved forward, into the wind, head down, one foot in front of the other. I tied on an unweighted soft plastic bait, rigged weedless, making it well-suited for the rock-chocked shallows. I can throw it into the heaviest cover and slide the bait over, around and between the many rocks shaggy with wrack weed.

I landed a pair of school bass before moving to a new perch, which allowed me to reach both sides of a large rock shaped like a worn canine tooth. The flood swept left to right past the boulder. Waves broke on both sides of the dark sentinel, leaving long patches of foam. Striped bass often feed under the cover of white water, relying on the disturbance to tear into baitfish or to strike lures successfully imitating them.

I caught two more small bass as evening fully descended. I climbed off the jumble of rocks and moved to the sand, where I wound up having one of my best fall nights of the season. With the wind at my back, I continued to toss the soft plastic, which the fish hammered with little hesitation. There were fish strung out along 100 yards of sand, where the bottom is a mix of high hard spots and sandbars, with deeper water along their flanks.

After a bass or two, I moved to my left, probing either side of a half-dozen bars where waves broke cleanly in the cloud-shrouded moonlight. Fish were staging all along the beach in the classic spots you’d expect to find them, given the topography and waves — at the end of a cast; just beyond the breakers and in the deep cuts inside the impact zone, where they scooted seaward, ripping drag as they went.

I released a baker’s dozen, with several fish in the 15- to 18-pound range. Great action, with hits or hookups every five or six casts. I reached a spot where things slowed. I was happily wet, tired and chilled, but not yet ready to call it a night. The season, after all, was ebbing fast. I walked back to where I started and resumed the drill. After 20 minutes or so, it was clear they were gone. The coastwide migration had been underway for a good month, and these fish travel quickly.

Since I was a boy, I have been drawn to the unfenced-in quality of the sea, especially in fall when gales fill the waters with steep moguls, and gulls and gannets dive on panicked bait amid wind-blown foam. I fish alone more often in these later years as friends move, age out, swallow the anchor or lose interest. I don’t mind solitude. There is an ocean of difference between loneliness and being alone. I fished the surf by myself as a boy, and I will probably go out the same way.

It’s not unusual to feel unmoored as the season races to a close and winter marshals its brutishness on the horizon. Some nights, the hem of the shore is barely fishable, as strong blasts send foam tumbling along the beach. The rips heave, the overfalls explode, and anyone with any sense is home and indoors.

I intend to fish the surf well into November. The four friends who have been on mind tonight know where to find me. We’ll have plenty of time to talk when the fish are scarce and temperatures plunge and the first flurries cause those few souls who remain on the beaches and rockpiles to sink into their heavy clothing.