Joan Sharrott and her husband, Dale Beacham, have seen the fortunes of the fish near her Staten Island, New York home rise and fall over the years. Fishing from their center-console boat in New York harbor and along the New Jersey coast, they have experienced the abundance of striped bass in the 1990s and 2000s and the striper’s relative scarcity today.

So when Sharrott, 63, a retired investment banker who calls herself “hopelessly addicted” to saltwater fly-fishing, connected with a big striper off Sandy Hook, New Jersey in early July, she knew something special was happening.


“Most people don't fly fish (for stripers) anymore because it’s too difficult,” she said. “I do believe things have changed.  Our saltwater fly fishery just isn’t what it used to be. You see it with the guides – they say they don't want to take people’s money for nothing. Our fishery used to be phenomenal. We were very spoiled. You could catch 20-pound bass all day long.”

On July 3, she did a lot better than 20 pounds. A rare early summer run of large menhaden, a key bait fish known locally as bunker, had led to a great bite. Bass were even blitzing the bait at the surface, a phenomenon that usually happens during the stripers’ annual southward migration in the fall.

Sharrott and Beacham were in about 20 feet of water off Sandy Hook at 7:30 p.m.  Sharrott usually fishes flies she tied herself, but on this occasion she selected a Magnum Baitfish designed and tied by New York saltwater fly guru Henry Cowen; she wasn’t crazy about any of her own flies at the moment and Cowen’s seemed to have the right profile.

 “There was a boil right within casting distance. I cast the fly, and I was like Holy Christmas, I got one on,” she recalled. “This fish ran and it ran.”

Fishing an 8-weight Temple Fork Outfitters rod, she felt under-gunned. She was also fishing in a crowd – the bunker run had drawn many vessels to the fishing grounds. But on this evening, her fellow anglers also sensed something special happening and did their part to help.

The fish ran underneath another boat alongside Sharrott’s. Beacham backed their boat up and the pilot of the boat next door eased ahead and to the side to clear the fish.

“People were getting out of my way because they knew the size of the fish and they saw I had it on a fly rod,” she said. After a nearly 30-minute battle, Beacham was able to grab the leader and hoist the fish aboard. On the scale the next day, it weighed 39 pounds.

When the 30-minute tussle ended, Sharrott had boated a 39-pound striper, a likely International Game Fish Association women’s world record on 20-pound tippet.

The fish might actually have been 40 pounds. Sharrott and Beacham weren’t able to weigh it until the next day, and fish often lose a little weight in the hours after they’re caught.

In any case, assuming the IGFA confirms the record, Sharrott’s striper shatters the old women’s record for a striper on 20-pound tippet – set by Sharrott herself in 2007: a 27 pound, 7 ounce striper (also caught on a Cowen Magnum Baitfish.)

Sharrott and Beacham are conservation-minded anglers who rarely kill the fish they catch. But they also know when they’ve got a fish that might set a record.

In fact, the 39-pound striper will be Sharrott’s ninth IGFA world record fish.

Along with the two bass records, Sharrott hold’s the women’s fly-rod records for bluefish (a 16 pound, 8 ounce fish on 12-pound tippet in September 2013 and a 15 pound, 9 ounce blue on 16-pound tippet the month before, both in New Jersey waters.) Her other records include a 5 pound, 2 ounce fluke off Staten Island in 2006, an 8 pound, 5 ounce skipjack tuna in the Rockaways in 1999 and weakfish of 7 pounds, 7 pounds 6 ounces and 12 pounds, 2 ounces off Staten Island.

As much as she enjoys the recognition for an exceptional catch, Sharrott doesn’t kill every big fish she boats. Seven years earlier, almost to the day, she caught a black drum very close to the spot where she connected with the 39-pound bass. She and Beacham estimated the drum at close to 70 pounds, a sure world record. But they let it go.

“It was humongous,” she said. “I looked at this thing, it looked me, and I said, ‘I can’t kill you.’”