Some Montauk surfcasters are so hardcore they don wetsuits and swim out to rock perches.

During the last week of September, or thereabouts, the immense population of striped bass that summers in Long Island Sound migrates out through the funnel between Beacon Hill and Montauk, New York. With a force as ineluctable as the moon’s gravitational pull, the bass migration draws hoards of fish-crazed anglers. They cannot help but file out east, in rusted out, four-wheel drives bristling with rods, across the Hamptons’ invisible pedigree fence. In fact, our motley brethren regard the non-fishing sophisticates of the Tudor style mansions ironically, if at all, as the deprived, or confined.

In his book, The Moon Pulled Up an Acre of Bass, Peter Kaminsky’s descriptions of this seasonal climax, and the subculture it inspires, first put the glassy, blitz-obsessed look in my eyes last fall.

“If you love fly fishing as I do, as my friends at [Montauk] Point do,” he taunts, “you will, at times, forsake career and family, sobriety, sleep, food, and warmth for the chance to be on the water when the migration occurs.”

The shoulds were plenty: “Now that you have power, get back to writing; tend to hurricane repairs; look for a job...” Instead I spend my last $300 on a plane ticket, leave friends, family and dogs in Florida to endure curfews and the herd’s hurricane histrionics, while I fly to New York with visions of blitzing stripers dancing in my head.

If You Go Montauk is hands down the Northeast’s inshore fishing focal point during the fall striped bass and false albacore migrations. But, the area is a hotspot from late May through Thanksgiving. Long Island Sound’s north shore can offer phenomenal sight fishing on flats for striped bass, especially in June. During the hot months of July and August, the emphasis shifts to night fishing the beaches and dredging the deeper rips during the day. The albies arrive in late August, and by September stronger runs of both bass and albies occur along the beaches and in the rips. It gets much easier to find affordable accommodations after Labor Day. After the blitzes are over, fishable numbers of huge stripers linger through October and November for a late-season herring run. While the weather is dicey, the late season is devoid of crowds and often produces the season’s biggest stripers. —T.G.

I never lose my way, but get disoriented heading “out east” on Montauk Highway. The sunset is straight behind me and the orderly farms and manicured yards are worlds away from the jungle, yet I feel like I’m headed literally and figuratively south, toward one of my hideaways in Central America, nearing one of those pleasant limbos where the artificial psychological arrows I call “social shoulds” can’t penetrate fish obsession. The way Kaminsky’s book describes it, ahead lies a bastion of that sweet madness shared by a loose cast of loner, fishing mavericks—denizens of floating docks and beaches beneath crumbling cliffs, who teeter on the edge of social acceptability. It may sound like limbo to some, but “The End” sounds like heaven to me.

I don’t get to see heaven as good as it gets, nor will the dozens of anglers coming to fish the Redbone-at-Large event. The day before the tournament flung Montauk’s recreational fishing fleet into a testosterone maelstrom, the remnants of Hurricane Jeanne stormed through and scattered the striped bass, bluefish and false albacore all over Long Island Sound. The conditions add a sense of desperation to the fish lust.

Of all the guides in Montauk, Capt. Amanda Switzer is the least put off by the conditions and the scattered fish. She had demurred from the tournament; instead she invited a few friends for two days of “binge fishing.”

“Beats combat fishing,” she says, launching into a torrid description, replete with four-letter intensifiers, of tournament fishing amid the frenetic jockeying that occurs during the blitz. “This weekend, we’ve got a wide open playing field.”

Amanda, one of the most colorful and expert members of the Montauk fly/light-tackle set, is probably sick of being introduced as the first woman to run a successful guide service on Long Island. Foolish, envious competitors say things like, “They charter her more to look at her than to fish with her.” While Amanda’s face could launch a thousand ships, it features a sailor’s mouth with a gaff for a tongue.

This heavy bass came off a deeper rip.

She stands in line at the coffee shop at 5, a captain entered in the tournament says, just loud enough for her to hear, “What, she’s not fishing the Redbone? She can’t hang?”

“No way I can compete,” she concedes, sarcastically. “Not with you soaking eels in the federal no-fishing zone.”

Doubtless the man would have started swinging had anyone else accused him of cheating, but he just looked down.