ABOUT 15 SUMMERS AGO, when my oldest sons were six and eight, we started a nighttime habit. After dinner a few nights a week, I’d drive them the half mile to a boat docked in a salt pond, putter around three miles through the estuary to the outlet to the sea, and throttle out onto the darkening Atlantic Ocean in the fading light. Behind us, our wake would spread in a widening vee. At our feet would be a bucket of live eels.
It is about a four-mile run to a boulder-strewn bit of coast where striped bass and bluefish often feed. There, just beyond the shore break, with the boys standing at the gunwales on a rising and falling swell, we’d cast eels from
