Hook into the Derby on Friday evening from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Louisa Gould Gallery, with live music, refreshments and first viewing of the benefit invitational Derby exhibition involving some 25 Island artists.

From 5 to 6 p.m. Ed Jerome will be signing the book he edited with Ray Ellis’s fishing art. The new exhibition includes oils, photographs, paintings, sculpture, works on paper and board, and the official Derby Grand Slam oil painting as well.

The striped bass is fun to catch and good to eat. It’s also enigmatic, historically prone to wild fluctuations in numbers and to inexplicable disappearances from area waters. And with the annual Island fishing derby opening Sunday, the old question is being asked again: where are all the fish?

Cooper Gilkes 3rd, an Island fisherman for more than 50 years and the owner of Coop’s Bait and Tackle in Edgartown, is concerned, for catch numbers seem to be in sharp decline.

Saturday night, an hour before sundown. The ferocious northeast wind from the day before has died, the only reminder a thick blanket of seaweed covering the rocky north shore. My friend and I are fishing. He has entered the derby; I have not. We trade off using two rods, one big, one small. The small rod has a sluggo, apparently the lure of choice for catching bass this year, the large one a popper.

Another lone fisherman stands in the rocks several hundred yards away. We can hear the quiet whine of his reel as he casts far out into the setting sun.

The fishermen will begin lining up with their fish well before the 8 a.m. Sunday opening of the weigh station at the foot of Main street in Edgartown. Many of the anglers will be sleep deprived, having not slept but a few hours overnight.

The fish arrived slowly at the weigh station on the opening day of the 63rd annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. And when they did begin to show up, they were carried by top derby anglers.

William Pate, 34, of West Tisbury walked into the weigh station at 8:02 a.m. carrying a 7.54-pound bluefish that he had caught at 2 a.m. in the morning. Asked where he caught the fish, his answer was quick. “State forest,” he said.

On the eve of the start of the 63rd annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby a cadre of friends gathered to celebrate a derby birthday. Don Mohr, 85, of West Tisbury, was honored by his friends and wife at a party at his home on Otis Bassett Road.

Their fish lines not yet in the water, derby anglers gathered for sandwiches and beverages and to share stories with Mr. Mohr, who was chairman of the derby from 1989 to 1991 and derby committee member from 1984 to 1991.

There was an early morning theft today at derby headquarters: A gull swept down while fillet master Hank Unczur wasn’t looking and stole one of his four bluefish fillets.

It’s only day three of the derby, but the herring gulls have taken up residence at the Edgartown Yacht Club and the newly-built Boathouse restaurant during derby weigh-in. Prematurely ready, the gulls are well-versed as they are in the affairs of the derby. They, too, know when it is derby time.

A new leader was weighed in at weigh station this morning. Morgan T. Taylor of West Tisbury, an avid angler, came in with a 11.68 pound bluefish at 8:09 a.m.

Mr. Taylor’s fish outweighed the previous shore leader, a fish caught by Matthew P. Wilkins and weighed in on Monday. Mr. Wilkins’ fish was 11.34 pounds.

The derby central headquarters opens at 8 a.m., so when Mr. Morgan walked in this morning with his big blue, he had everyone’s attention.

By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

As the farmer brings in the last vegetables, in autumn the lobsterman’s season is starting to slow down.

Capt. Paul MacDonald of the lobsterboat Shearwater was putting some of his yellow-wire pots away at the dock at Menemsha Tuesday afternoon. “It was a good season, though I had to work hard to make the same amount of money as last year,” the captain said.

There is good and bad news in the stories he and others shared about his past summer.

Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree is a celebrated black writer, teacher and speaker and director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. But on Sunday, he accomplished something truly special: he was in the leader’s spot in the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby on Sunday, weighing in a 26.68-pound striped bass he had caught earlier in the day, fishing with Buddy Vanderhoop and a couple of friends.