When Jason Caplan of Raleigh went fishing on May 3 with Terry Suess, they caught (and released) 133 striped bass up to 21 inches long, a great day by most standards.

But it was fish No. 134 that made it a career day for Caplan.

Using an 8/9-weight fly rod, a shad fly, a big assist from Suess (whose professional credits include helping develop materials to enable plasma television technology) and a whole of lot of luck, Caplan landed a 42.9-pound striped bass from the murky waters of the Roanoke River.

Oh, yeah, he did it at night while wearing Crocs and briefly hooking himself on a fly attached to another rod in the boat.

"It was a real improbable sequence of events," Seuss said.

The duo launched their 1987 Swan Point at the public ramp in Weldon a little after 1 p.m. and took turns weaving the boat through other anglers while fishing. The bite picked up around 4 p.m. They caught stripers through sunset.

At 9 p.m., the pair anchored near the "little river," a feeder creek landmark downstream of Weldon. It was there Caplan made the magic cast.

"I tried pulling and pulling and all of a sudden it started moving," said Caplan, who thought he was hung up. "We were anchored, so I moved to the back of the boat. Then it realized it was hooked."

The seesaw battle that ensued saw Caplan's thumb bloodied from trying to stop the surging runs by thumbing the spool.

After 40 minutes of stalemate, the pair decided to pull the anchor and follow the fish, since only two boats were visible on the river and the chances of landing the unseen leviathan on a 17-pound test tippet were not great anyway.

Then Caplan was hooked -- on his backside -- as he fought the big striper. Quick action by Seuss -- he bit the line with his teeth -- freed Caplan.

After a half mile of drifting and about 50 minutes of fighting, Caplan worked the fish close enough for Seuss to shine a light on it. They realized it wouldn't fit in their net. They managed to work the head in and heft the fish aboard.

"I let out a big whoop, like a shriek," said Caplan, who has been fishing the Roanoke since the mid-1990s. "If you're not passionate about something ... it's hard to explain. I won a regional tennis tournament in college, and it's on the same level."

Suess said the pair had somewhat of a dress rehearsal for the event last year on the Roanoke, when Caplan helped Seuss land a 27-pound striped bass.

"It was a shorter fight with a smaller fish," said Suess, 53, "but it was at night and the roles were reversed."

Chad Thomas, coastal fisheries research coordinator for the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, was impressed with the catch.

"This is a top-10 catch [for the Roanoke]," said Thomas, who collects data from thousands of striped bass each year. "That's the biggest fish I've heard of this year."

Thomas said that big stripers are a relatively new phenomenon on the river, and he captured the first 40-pounder during a sampling trip to collect data in 2002.

Only 10 stripers (also called rockfish) have broken the 40-pound barrier this year -- out of more than 5,000 his crew has sampled.

The fish are travelers, too. He said that he has had tags from Roanoke River stripers returned from as far away as Long Island, N.Y.

A striper this big can produce as as many as 4 million eggs. Caplan and Seuss were keenly aware of her spawning potential.

"I was worried she wouldn't make it," he said. "I spent two or three minutes reviving her and she flipped away.

"We used the floodlight to watch her swim away."

Seuss concurred.

"We landed her, we revived her and we know they are there to spawn, and she swam away to do her thing," he said.

After the fish disappeared in the darkness, the anglers did too, as they motored up the now empty river to the landing.

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