Use Herring for Keeper Striped Bass in Massachusetts's Salem Sound

There are few undersea creatures along the Massachusetts coastline more vulnerable than a lobster that has shed its carapace. Having grown within its shell by a few millimeters, the lobster peels off its too-tight suit of armor in about an hour, wriggling and struggling, until newly-freed and sporting a new shirt and underpants, it scuttles along the bottom in a fresh shell soft as a water balloon.

They're called shedders, and in the hand that lifts them from the plate at the local dine-in-rough they are as pliable as the foam we're number one! hands that get tossed into the stadium parking lot pond after the playoffs. Shedders are so bendy you could fold one into a mason jar, wait a week, then unfold it like a love letter.

The gullet and stomach of striped bass in the lobster waters of Gloucester, Rockport, Salem and Cape Cod, on the other hand, are tube-like, rubbery affairs so tough to they can hold all manner of sharp-edged objects such as crabs, spiny fish, crustaceans. Once any of the former take the forced elevator ride into the striper's stomach, they hang around wondering what the hell next? all without ill effect to the fish, who eventually digests them with powerful enzymes in the gut.

Because the striper's throat is essentially a hose attached to a vacuum, stripers suck in their prey feed whole, like a seagull. Imagine a hot-water bottle full of kewpie dolls - that's a striper's mealtime gullet.

My cousin and I are kayak fishing Salem Sound, southeast of Manchester and Marblehead, Massachusetts, about the midway point between Gloucester and outer Boston Harbor.

We've tied off to one of the dozens of lobster buoys that ring the southwestern shore of Bakers Island taking shelter from the swell while we stillfish calm water with herring chunks on bare hooks in hopes of taking a couple of keepers 28"-long and longer.