There’s no heat left in the sunshine by the time it reaches the bottom of Cattail. Every last joule has been poached by blue crystal skies and what finally descends is ice cube cold, diamond sharp. Light like daggers. If focused on tinder through a magnifying glass, it would freeze-dry and shatter rather than ignite.

The only warmth to be found leaks between interleaved wool and fleece, seeps through Gore-Tex and polypro, or vents through chapped lips in short jets of steam as we climb the icy stairways of water. How can one be so hot and so cold at the same time? Each extreme, heat and chill, feeds the other in the thermal yin and yang of insulating layers.

From an inner breast pocket, my old-man specs immerge, coated with a warm sheen of sweat that frosts almost audibly as glacial rays bend through the glass; lenses become lozenges more fitting in a tumbler of scotch than on the bridge of my nose. But the copper john needs to get deeper so I squint through the translucence and clumsily add another shot.

When I was asked to write about pursuing striped bass in the fall and fly fishing techniques used to target them, I almost passed on the offer. I thought back on how, 20 years ago in my home state of New Jersey, you could walk down to a jetty or groin on the right tide, time of day and pick away at all the schoolie bass your heart desired simply by throwing an appropriate pattern into the rock pockets and letting the fly breath in the tide.

We did this back then with a floating line, mostly 8 and 9 weight sticks and stripping baskets. The idea behind the floating line was to keep hammering the pockets using a quick water haul and to keep presenting the fly to a target in a coordinated rhythm with the surge. A jetty ace from back then used to call this process 'fishing the hydraulics'. It was killer. And, of course, there were fish everywhere -- which made the whole picture complete. Variations on this approach involved using poppers or crease flies and changing patterns appropriately as the bait changed, but always using floating lines. The presentations were generally very short in duration and you timed your casts between waves so the grab of the floating line by the surf never became an issue.

As years passed, more and more fly anglers ventured to sink tips or full sink and intermediate lines and employed a style of fishing I typically refer to as 'covering ground'. These tactics are an effective way to fish, but are as different from fishing the hydraulics as blind casting is to sight casting. Repeatedly blind casting to quadrants is a dramatically different fishing experience than the visual one that comes with casting to a fish boil behind a rock or nervous bait in a close rip.