IN SEARCH OF A SET: DISASTER AVERTED

PETER MATTHIESSEN

In the spring of 1955, at dawn on a rough April day, we were heading east from Napeague Lane in search of a set.

"No weather today, boys," Ted [Lester] kept saying. "Wind's pickin' up out of the east'rd." But the whole crew had bills to pay, and so we went looking for a stretch of surf where we could launch the yellow dory.

Captain Frank's [Frank Lester's] crew was even hungrier; we saw the black lumps of four trucks in silhouette on the beach at Hither Plains, where another crew was helping Frank go off. In the ocean distance, the black figures were up to their chests in the white surf, which twisted the dory as the wash rushed high onto the beach.

Then, too slowly, the boat drew away. She took a buffet - the white spray shot up, and she staggered. It seemed certain that the next wave would break right into her. She kept moving, and rose slowly on the wave face. But she had lost too much momentum, and the wave was too big, and the bow kept rising on the gray daybreak sky, the dory poised for a long awful moment, cocked on end. Then the wave, breaking, hurled her over backward.

Ted had already smelled disaster; the silver truck was howling down the beach, burning its gears. A minute later, we were out on the dead run into the sea, hauling at the net. Ding-Ding (Frank's son Harry) had been thrown clear, but the two other men were missing. They might have been struck by the crashing dory or caught under the net, which was unwinding in long tentacles along the beach with the set to westward, perhaps dragging stunned men in waders beneath the surface.

Then a dark shape rolled out from beneath the dory, disappeared, popped up again; he was seized and dragged ashore. It was Richard, who had left Ted's crew to go back fishing with his father. In the tumult, trying to keep our footing, trying not to get entangled or go under, we might easily have failed to notice him.

Fear for the third man was rising like panic when someone thought to look beneath the dory. The man who turned up, scared but unhurt, was Captain Frank's grandson, Walter Bennett, who swore that day that never would he go off in a dory again.

The above is from "Men's Lives."