Indomitable

On an island known for molding tenacious surf anglers, Janet Messineo ranks among its hardiest. Even as she battles spinal stenosis and balance issues, the 75-year-old retired taxidermist and island fixture is not ready to hang up her waders.

An acclaimed surf angler and author, Messineo is woven into the rich fabric of life on Martha’s Vineyard — an island about seven miles off Massachusetts best known as a vacation spot for presidents and celebrities. Thousands appreciate the Vineyard for its renowned saltwater fishing and the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby (which runs more than a month, Sept. 10-Oct. 31 this year). This will be the event’s 78th year.

A casual drive around the island with Messineo feels like something of a victory tour, with many hugs and catch-up conversations with the people she encounters. She stops at Coop’s Bait and Tackle in Edgartown, where she chats with island legend Cooper Gilkes.

We have lunch in the salty little village of Menemsha, where Messineo promises charter skipper Buddy Vanderhoop that she will “touch up” his 65-pound striper, which she skin-mounted about 30 years ago. “If I’m not home, just leave it on my front porch,” Messineo hollers over the wind as we walk to Larsen’s Fish Market. “I know the fish.” It’s this small-town intimacy that makes the Vineyard special.

After lunch, we walk to a sandy beach on the east side of the inlet, where Messineo casts a popping plug for a little while. Her long hair is streaked with gray, and her face is as comely as in photos taken 50 years ago. “She’s still beautiful,” says longtime fishing friend Randy Cameron, who is 55. “She has an aura that’s almost like,” he pauses for a moment, “a wisdom or presence. You just gravitate toward her.”

Messineo wrote an honest, revealing memoir, Casting into the Light (Pantheon Books, 2019), that focuses primarily on her fishing life on the island and the colorful characters she’s known. In a surf-fishing world once composed almost exclusively of tight-lipped, secretive men, many of whom were selling their striped bass, Messineo beat the gender odds and was accepted into their ranks. She was as tough and dedicated as anyone on the beach, often outfishing those who once were her naysayers. Today, she is widely known on the Vineyard as a skilled and knowledgeable angler.

“The first couple of years, no one would give her the time of day,” says Peter Shepardson, an island resident who has been Messineo’s Derby teammate for about six years. “She learned a lot from those old island fishermen, and then she became one. She stepped in and outfished some of the older guys.”

Messineo’s book is an unvarnished look at an insular fishing tribe that is slowly disappearing. Much of the action revolves around the Derby, which continues to exert a powerful hold on anglers.

A free spirit who grew up during the counter-culture era of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Messineo remains outgoing and gregarious. She seems to know most everyone on the island. “She is a celebrity, and she doesn’t mind it a bit,” says Liz Packer, a friend who grew up on the Vineyard and fly-fishes the salt.

From a bumbling surf-fishing wannabe, a determined Messineo grew into a respected elder who is firmly embedded in the foundation of island life, fishing and otherwise. “It’s more than just catching fish,” Packer says. “She reminds us of why we fish and why we come back to it. The fish are lovely, but the community is what it’s really about.”

Since 2020, the Derby has excluded striped bass from its list of eligible fish — for only the second time in its long history. This is due to concerns about the health of the striper fishery and the imposition of a coastwide slot limit, which essentially means participants must release fish over 31 inches. Daily, weekly and grand prizes will be awarded for bluefish, false albacore and bonito.

Messineo, who has been on the Derby committee for decades, supports the decision, even though a contest without striped bass is a letdown for her and others. “I’ll fish as hard as I can, but you know, I’m a bass fisherman,” Messineo explains. “I’ll go, but albie fishing is not my thing. My soul is into bass fishing. I love sneaking around at night.” False albacore and bonito are daytime catches.

These days, Messineo is focused on conservation, taking others fishing and doing the occasional touch-up on her fish mounts. But she hasn’t forgotten the lessons of her mentors. “I was taught back in the old days,” says Messineo, who refers to herself as a fisherman. “We were selling fish, so you kept your mouth shut. It’s not the same now, but I still have that ingrained in me: Keep your mouth shut.”

Selling bass was legal back then, but the money only heightened the devotion to secrecy. Many surf spots are small and capable of holding only a few anglers — no one was inclined to share their big-fish honey holes with anyone but a trusted partner. “She still carries a little of that with her,” fly-fishing friend Packer notes. “It was a tough crowd. She worked hard to earn her place on the beach.”

Fall surf fishing is often strenuous, with its share of nor’easters that batter the shores with wind, rain and high waves. Even on a good night, fishing the rocks requires balance; it’s not unusual for the most sure-footed to take a fall when they’re bone-tired.

Messineo suffers back pain and often walks with a hiking pole for support. She’d had an epidural steroid injection a couple of weeks before I visited her. These days, she has to adjust her fishing to the realities of her body and aging. “I have to reinvent myself,” Messineo says. “I want to be out there so bad. I have no balance, as you might have noticed.” One thing she does have are friends who are more than happy to help.

Roundabout

Messineo has come a long way from her childhood home on mainland Massachusetts, but the distance can’t be measured in miles. “I was a kid from the projects of Lawrence, Massachusetts,” Massineo says. She’s the daughter of Italian and English immigrants, and her father worked in mills and factories his entire life. “For a guy with no education, he did really well. He became a foreman.”

Her parents were loving but protective. Looking back, she calls herself a “tomboy,” happier getting her hands dirty and wearing her brother’s hand-me-down jeans than donning a dress.

Messineo’s restless streak coincided with the tumultuous 1960s. She says her parents wanted her “to become a secretary so that you’ll meet and marry a rich man.” She wanted to be an artist. She left home at 18, hitchhiking with a knapsack, a raccoon vest like the one Cher wore and her guitar. She hoped to discover in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, the artistic community of which she dreamed.

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She wrote in her book that she “found more drama than art” there and stuck her thumb out once more. She landed in Hyannis, where a couple of guys she was playing guitar with in a park asked if she wanted to go to Martha’s Vineyard. “What’s Martha’s Vineyard?” she asked. Upon learning it was an island, she immediately had thoughts of palm trees, monkeys and bananas.

She rolled onto the island for the first time in the summer of 1966 on the back of a Vespa driven by a guy named Bernie, wearing her vest and short-short cutoff jeans. Thus began her island life. With summer coming to an end, she landed a job as a mate on the headboat Marsh Wind. She was paid $2 a day and slept on a cot on board. Then she got a job and a place to live taking care of a resident’s two sons. Late that fall, she was bullied by a town cop, who tried to run her off the island for being a “vagrant,” a common ploy used to convince “free spirits” they weren’t welcome.

Messineo was rescued by friends and stayed put, marrying her first husband, a lifeguard in Vineyard Haven Harbor, in the summer of 1967. During the winter of 1968, they left the island in a 1961 Plymouth Valiant and joined the youthful migration to California. The couple moved to San Francisco and rented a room in an apartment on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, ground zero for drugs, hippies and the counter-culture movement. Some months later, they returned to New England, where they worked to save money to buy 40 acres in Milton, New Hampshire.

For two years, they lived in a tepee from spring to fall while trying to build a log cabin and grow their own food. By age 24, Messineo found the back-to-nature movement wearing thin. “I returned to the island in 1972 without a husband,” she wrote.

Partners

When she returned to the Vineyard for good, Messineo was determined to learn how to fish the surf as she supported herself by waitressing. She recalls hitchhiking along the beaches in floppy waders with her inexpensive two-piece rod and a 1-ounce Rebel. Messineo had a lot of energy and enthusiasm, but not much to show for her early efforts in the way of fish. She needed a mentor, but finding one was no easy task in a fishing culture unwelcoming to outsiders, especially females.

Eventually, she found her fishing partner in Jackie Coutinho, a skilled shore fisherman who Messineo swore could “magically” find fish. An island butcher, Coutinho taught Messineo how to dissect a beach, fish live eels, work big plugs, fish live bunker snagged from shore, and a host of other nuances she needed in her plug bag.

“Once Jackie and I became a team, the locals finally took me seriously,” she wrote in her memoir. “A new way of life had opened to me. I was fortunate to have Jackie Coutinho in my life as my mentor and my friend.” They fished together for 12 years and grew so in-synch, she recalls, “We didn’t even have to talk.”

As a wide-eyed kid 40 some years ago, Cameron, her fishing friend, remembers watching in awe as Messineo caught one bonito and false albacore after another off the ferry dock in Oak Bluffs. “I started watching Janet when I was 10 years old,” says Cameron, a hydroponic gardening specialist who lives in Oak Bluffs and New York City. “She was my hero back then. She stood out.”

Cameron remembers how comfortable she was talking smack among the clutch of hard-boiled male piscators. “Tough as nails,” he says. “She outfished them all.”

For a number of years, Messineo and Coutinho helped each other stay afloat. Each had demons that snared them like hapless swimmers in a rip current. Coutinho struggled for years with schizophrenia, which Messineo says was easier for him to keep under control when he was chasing stripers. She, too, had monkeys on her back in the form of alcohol and drugs. For a time, she wrote, her obsession with striper fishing “distracted” her from her substance abuse.

Messineo quit alcohol and opiates for good in the mid-1980s. Coutinho never recovered from his own trials. He committed suicide before Christmas in 1990. “I miss Jackie Coutinho,” Messineo wrote. “He was a true fishing buddy.”

The 1984 Derby was a high-water mark for the partners. Janet was full of energy, fishing clean and sober for the first time in a while. With only five days left in the tournament, they decided to fish all night. They had nary a bump, except for a menhaden that Messineo snagged on her swimmer. They took that as a good sign and decided to wait and see what dawn might bring.

As the sun began to rise, the anglers saw a pod of jumbo bass moving through the waves, feeding on bunker. They quickly cut off their lures and tied on the weighted treble hooks used to snag menhaden. Soon they were into large fish. Coutinho’s striper weighed 48¾ pounds, which won the overall striper prize, a first for Coutinho. Messineo’s fish weighed 45 pounds, large enough for second place.

Home

In 1988 she married Tristan Israel, a musician who spent decades in local politics, including 25 years as a selectman from Tisbury. They have an adopted son, Christopher, who is a member of the Wampanoag tribe and is 33 years old. The couple live in a comfortable island bungalow. The home is quiet, with a serene, laidback feel. They have a small greenhouse out back. “I live six minutes from good fishing, down dirt roads,” says Messineo, as she gives a visiting writer and photographer a tour.

“OK, this is my man cave,” she says, leading us into her office at the back of the house. “Tristan says it looks like an old hippie with a streak of redneck.” The office is filled with Derby memorabilia, photos, plaques, rods owned by old friends and much more. What we’re really looking forward to seeing is Messineo’s taxidermy studio in the basement, where her work still covers the walls of two offices.

In 1987, Messineo attended a three-month course in taxidermy at the Pennsylvania Institute of Taxidermy. The course cost $2,000 at the time, a significant sum for a woman who worked as a shore guide and waitress. She shared an apartment with another student. “I was stepping out of my life for three months,” says Messineo, who wanted to learn how to make skin mounts rather than those produced from fiberglass molds.

Her skin mounts today are widely praised for their lifelike quality and detail. “The work was never easy. It was always labor-intensive,” she says. Messineo is mostly retired but still does touch-ups of her older mounts.

Messineo appeared in Bob Post’s 1988 book, Reading the Water, in which he profiled one notable Vineyard angler in each chapter. Messineo was one of 16 surf anglers that the late author chose. In his introduction to Messineo’s chapter, Post contrasted seeing her fishing in the spring, when nothing was at stake, with a glimpse of her in fall, when she was in full Derby mode and jigging off a dock for tinker mackerel to use as bait.

“Janet looked so tired she appeared to be walking horizontally, defying gravity, straining against a strong wind,” Post wrote. “Her hair, tangled and matted with salt spray from previous encounters in the surf. … Squid ink, bunker oil, mackerel scales and butterfish slime caked her hands and clothing. Bandages and adhesive tape covered the line cuts and hook punctures that created a bizarre pattern of dots and lines on her fingers. It was Derby time on the Vineyard, and Janet had fishing fever.”

Janet Messineo had become what she’d long dreamed of: a full-fledged surf veteran wise in the ways of striped bass.