Buddy poses with clients and their catches. From left: Dave Coston, from Virginia, and Kenny and Jay Brown, brothers from California. They all vacation on-Island with their families every summer. Photo by Lisa Vanderhoop

In the beginning

Buddy, how is it that everyone knows your name?

Well, I’ve been a charter captain for about twenty-five or twenty-six years now.

I started fishing when I was about four years old with my dad. We used to go out and catch stripers and tautog and fluke. And when I was six years old, before West Basin Road was put in there, me and my four-year-old brother walked from Lobsterville all the way around to the west jetty. We had a couple of my dad’s fishing lures. There was a yellow and pink Atom swimmer; I cast it out and I caught probably a twenty-five-pound fish – it was almost as big as me. We got it on the beach and it was the most exciting thing I’d ever even dreamed about. I said to my brother, “We gotta go now.” So he carried the fishing rod and the tackle box, and I struggled with the fish. I dragged him all the way down the beach, down to Lobsterville Road, then I dragged him home from Lobsterville Road. We had to stop about every quarter mile because it was so heavy, and by the time I got home, it didn’t have a tail left because I’d dragged the tail off. But I got that fish home, and I was just – I was the king. I was so proud of myself. That’s what started it all, I guess.

I did a lot of beach fishing from the time I was six until all through junior high school. We’d get dropped off at my mom’s house [after school], then we’d jump on our bicycles and we’d run up to the Aquinnah Shop – that was the family restaurant – and we’d run right down the Cliffs there, and we used to catch striped bass every single day during the fall season after school. We’d catch so many bass, sometimes it would take us five or six trips back up and down the Cliffs to get the fish up.

What happened with all that fish?

We used to give it away to all the local Indians around town. But my father, you know, he’d be working down-Island – he worked for Andrews and Pierce Trucking, which was a delivery service (they didn’t have UPS in those days) – and so, you know, he’d get home from work and all of sudden there’d be six or eight or ten fish there for him to have to clean. After about three weeks of him cleaning fish every day, he said, “This has gotta stop. Either you’ve got to stop fishing or learn to clean the fish yourself.” So I started filleting fish when I was ten or eleven years old, and I’ve been filleting fish ever since.

Stripers were always my main target fish. They’re such a big and exciting fish. I got my first fifty-pounder when I was thirteen years old, down at Squibnocket. My grandfather was the caretaker at Squibnocket for forty-seven years, and even after he retired, the Hornblowers used to let me park at the bass club. When I was in my twenties, on my birthday every year, my buddies would take me out to fish Squibnocket to deter me from the girls getting the place ready for a surprise party. I caught a fifty-pounder there, every year for five years in a row, on my birthday. It’s unbelievable.

As a matter of fact, I used to have a telephone pole out in front of the driveway here, it was the fifty-pounder club, and if you caught a fifty-pounder, then I would mount your fish’s head on the pole. And as a matter of fact, the cover of Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish’s first album, Mystery Road, is that telephone pole with my striped-bass totem: They were all decrepit – they’d been out there for months – but he took a picture and that was the cover.

At one point I think there were sixteen heads on the pole. I had a bunch, my friend Hollis Smith had a couple, my friend Steve Dufresne had some, there were a lot of people who had fifty-pounders on my totem pole out there. I guess it may have irritated the phone company, when they had to come up and do some work on the pole, to have all these rotting fish heads. It looked really cool. They stayed there till they rotted off, it was pretty awesome.

On a hot day, Michael Mann and Jim Belushi fish with Jim’s son Robert.“I had Jim Belushi and [movie producer, writer, and director] Michael Mann out with me, and they caught a lot of fish. It was a really hot day and even on the water it was probably high eighties, low nineties, no wind whatsoever.”- Buddy Photo by Lisa Vanderhoop

Charter captain to the stars

Back in 2000, Spike Lee got a fifty-seven-pounder – his first time out fishing. It was the biggest fish caught in Massachusetts that year, so he got the Governor’s Cup. When we got in, just out of coincidence, [photographer] Alison Shaw was walking on the dock, and she said, “Wow, look at the size of that fish! Can I get a picture?” And I said “Sure, Spike, hold your fish up.” He said, “I can’t hold that fish up! You hold it up, and I’ll stand beside you.” So I held it up, and we made all the major papers in the country and People Magazine, so that brought in a lot of charters for me. I got the [former] owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers; a lot of sports people hooked up with me to go fishing. It was really cool.

They call you the charter captain to the stars. Is that day with Spike Lee when it started?

No, that had started a long time before. I know a lot of people. Like through James Taylor, and the Taylor family, I know a lot of music people. I know a lot of sports people; I know some of the Celtics and some of the Boston Red Sox, and I take [Red Sox vice-chairman] Dave Ginsberg and [owner] John Henry. I’ve done a lot of fishing shows with Trevor Gowdy. Trevor is long-time Boston Red Sox announcer Curt Gowdy’s son, and Curt started [the original reality sports-fishing television show] American Sportsman with Bob Nixon, who’s a good friend of mine.

Talk about how that started.

Well, Trevor’s been a friend of mine for about twenty-five or thirty years, and he’s always said, “Buddy, your fishing abilities are great, so let’s just put some celebrities on your boat and bring a film crew down.” So I did. I brought [Jim] Belushi out the first trip.

Were these folks who were already chartering with you?

Fishing in underwear

On a hot day, Michael Mann and Jim Belushi fish with Jim’s son Robert. Yes, quite a few of them. Belushi first went out with me, jeez, mid-eighties. I had Jim Belushi and [movie producer, writer, and director] Michael Mann out with me, and they caught a lot of fish. It was a really hot day and even on the water it was probably high eighties, low nineties, no wind whatsoever, and my wife has pictures of Jim Belushi and Michael Mann fishing in their underwear. I threatened to put that in the Enquirer. [Laughing.] They said, “If you do, we’re going to sue you.”

I take out the [production] VP of Warner Brothers, Bruce Berman. Between Bruce Berman and Michael Mann, a lot of people from Hollywood come here in the summer and they broadcast me as: “If you go to the Vineyard, you gotta go fishing with Buddy.”

I’ve heard some stories about you and Keith Richards. Care to share?

I’ve known Keith for thirty years: We used to party at the Outermost Inn back in the late seventies. About five years ago, Keith came back to the Island, and I was up at my mom’s restaurant, the Aquinnah Shop, and Keith was walking down from the overlook with a bunch of his friends from London, and he says, “Buddy! Buddy Vanderhoop! What are you doing? I’m here for the whole summer. Let’s go fishing.” So Keith shows up at my boat at 7 a.m., and he’s got a ten-ounce cup in his hand. I say, “What’s in the cup, Keith?” He says [attempting a British accent], “Oh, vodka and grapefruit. Grapefruit’s a morning drink, you know.”

So we went out, we started catching lots of fish, and after every fish he caught, he’d have a cocktail. By the time we got back to the dock at noontime, he was plastered. I have pictures of him laying down on the dock with the fish, with a big shit-eatin’ grin on his face with his cocktail. [Laughing.]

After I filleted their fish, he said, “Buddy, this afternoon, I’m going to freak you out.” I said, “I don’t think so, I’m going to be out fishing.” And he said, “You’ll see.”

I didn’t think anything about it. I got my clients on the boat, we left, and we started catching fish. I was fishing right at the end of Zack’s Cliffs [in Aquinnah], and all of a sudden, around the bend of Squibnocket Point, comes this – I think it was an early 1940s vintage B-17 bomber. My clients were still in the back fishing, and all of a sudden the plane goes into a dive and came within probably one hundred feet of my antenna, and then the pilot crammed all the power of the four engines, and it made such a roar when it buzzed that my clients all hit the deck. Keith Richards was in the front glass gun turret, laughing his ass off, and his son Marlon was in the gun turret on the top, and his friends from London were in the gun turret in the back, and they were just cracking up. They buzzed me four times. It was – pretty unique. It had never happened to me before.

Or since, probably.

Right. When he’s here I go over to his house for dinner three or four times. Very dedicated family man, does a lot of things with his kids. He wanted to go fishing with me last year, but it was the end of their tour, and Mick [Jagger] said, “No, we have to practice.” I said, “Practice? You been playing that same stuff for forty years!”

Is it true there’s some interest in your doing a television show together?

Keith wants to do a fishing show with me off the Great Barrier Reef. He wants to catch great white sharks – he just wants to catch and release. So it’s in the works with Trevor Gowdy.

And now, one of my best friends has just recently been promoted to head producer of ESPN-East, James Ebron. This isn’t in stone yet, but [fishing charter captain] Jennifer Clarke and I are going to do a show together with ESPN with the Boston Red Sox. I’m going to take out the players and she’s going to take out their wives. We’re going to have a competition.

Crazy about cormorants

In 2003, you got in trouble shooting some cormorants.

Yes, I did! [With great cheer.]

I’ve run the Aquinnah Wam- panoag herring run for thirty-three years, and cormorants are so thick now that you get five hundred cormorants around in front of the creek. We close the gate so that the pool fills up, then we seine the pool and take between four to five thousand fish off-Island to different bait stores – we’re the only people allowed to take bulk herring and sell them. It’s tribal land and whoever has the lease for the creek can do what he wants three days a week. About the time the stripers show up, around the first of May, we start taking herring for bait – we catch ’em three mornings a week and let them run free four days a week, because if you don’t, you’re going to exterminate all the fish that are spawning up there.

But, what’s been happening in the last ten years is the fish are coming into the pool at night, then first light comes, and you got five hundred birds out in front, and then you got fifty to a hundred birds in the pool. Each one of those cormorants eats between ten and fifteen pounds of fish each a day, so they’re just in there gorging themselves on these fish that are penned up, that we’re depending upon making money with. And what they can’t eat is driven back out of the pool, so we end up with nothing in the pool. This happened day after day after day after day, so I really got pissed off, and I went down there one day with my twelve gauge. It’s so much fun to shoot ’em!

And you know, they used to have a bounty on ’em in Maine – they were fifty cents apiece – because they were just devastating everything up there. But that was twenty years ago. Since then, they’re protected all over the United States. They’re not even an indigenous bird; they came from Asia. They have no predators here – except me.

When I was a kid, during the course of the whole season you might see one hundred, and now, you can go to Menemsha and see two hundred at any given point. If you sit around Menemsha harbor and just watch the birds, every time they go down they come up with a baby flounder or an eel. And look what they did: They closed down Sengekontacket Pond to shellfishing because there’s so many birds there, shitting in the water.

So what happened after you shot the birds that time?

Because it was done on tribal property, the state couldn’t prosecute me, but the tribe banned me from the herring creek for a year. [So my brother took over.]

Was there a bad feeling in the tribe about it?

Well, they were sort of pissed off. They knew how bad it looked in the newspapers. (At this point Buddy’s wife, Lisa, joins the conversation briefly.)

Lisa: I think it was more a PR thing. I can’t tell you how many phone calls we got.

Buddy: People saying, “You should get a medal for doing it.”

Lisa: Yeah, 99 percent of them were like, “Yeah, Buddy! Right on! You’re doing something we only dreamed about!” And it was intergenerational – it was young people calling, it was ninety-nine-year-olds calling, saying [imitates old-geezer voice], “Eyup, wish I ’ad shot ’em.” There was only one guy who said, “Well, I think it’s just awful.” But that was really the only one out of about a hundred calls.

Buddy: Yeah, at least a hundred phone calls. [The cormorants] were just standing in the way of me making any money, for weeks. And it was so frustrating that I felt I had to do something about it.

Since then, has anything changed with the cormorant situation?

Buddy: No. They’re still eating all the fish. There’s been a moratorium on herring for the last three years, and they’ve just extended it for another three years. The state and the federal government haven’t acknowledged the fact that mid-water trawlers catching the alewives [herrings] offshore before they get back here to their spawning grounds is part of the problem. But the other problem is the cormorants eating not only the adults, but, when they hatch out, the fry. They’re just gorging themselves on the fry – at Squibnocket Pond, all the way down through the creek, out into Menemsha Pond. I go to all the herring meetings.

Lisa: These are supposed to be knowledgeable environmental policy-makers, and [everyone who lives and works on the water] is saying, “Listen, we’ve seen major degradation of the waters and taking of the young herring because of the cormorant problems.” And these guys

Buddy: – the state –

Lisa: – all these guys did was they put up graphs and said, “Well, we think there might be a correlation, but you know what? We think we need more studies.” And they were talking about doing studies anywhere from a time frame of the next two-to-three to five-to-ten years.

Buddy: But the problem is happening now.

What would you like to see happen with the cormorant situation?

Buddy: Well, there’s an easy way to make them not propagate: Go over to their rookeries – Sengekontacket Pond, the little rock-islands in Squibnocket Pond, and Noman’s Land, there’s a population of probably ten thousand of those birds on the northeast corner of Noman’s – you can have a crew of people go over there with spray bottles full of olive oil and spray the eggs. If you break their eggs, they’ll lay more, but if you spray them with olive oil, they’ll sit on them all summer long whether they hatch or not, and they won’t hatch, because the oil kills the embryo inside because it can’t breath. That’s a real simple solution to stop them from multiplying.

But in the meantime, you gotta get rid of some of these birds that are here. If you could get permits, say, for five hundred a year, everybody could shoot five hundred a year. [Grinning.] I could do cast-and-blast charters: Go catch your limit of fish, then blow away about a hundred birds.

The second part of this two-part story will appear in the October issue of The Fishermen’s Voice.

This story originally appeared in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, July 2009.