17 North Beach Street
Nantucket, MA 02554
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HOOKED ON NANTUCKET
Captain Tom Mleczko reflects on fifty years on the water.
Back in the 1970s, there were five charter fishing captains on the entire island. Today, only one of those original captains remains. Tom Mleczko has been a fixture in Madaket Harbor since 1973. Over the past five decades, he’s taken thousands of people aboard his fleet of blue- and red- hulled boats to cast light tackle in search of bass, bluefish and the occasional run of tuna. His devoted client list includes Pulitzer Prize winners, Fortune 500 CEOs, Super Bowl champions and one U.S. president.
Captain Tom himself has risen to his own notoriety, developing a similar mythic stature on the island as Madaket Millie. In fact, there’s even a sandwich named after him at Millie’s namesake restaurant on the island’s west end. Now as Mleczko motors towards his fiftieth anniversary on the water, he has eased off the throttle, stepped back from the helm and taken stock of his life on the water.
Fishing was an obsession when Mleczko first arrived on the island from Maine in 1970 to run a children’s camp. He worked all day and fished all night. “I was in heaven,” he recalled. “I couldn’t believe how amazing the fishing was.” Thanks to his wife Priscilla “Bambi” Gifford, whom he met on the island and wed a year later, Mleczko was convinced to go pro with his passion for fishing in 1973. He got his captain’s license, bought an old twenty-six-foot bass boat and hung his shingle advertising fishing trips for $60 a pop.
There were some skinny summers in those early days. To make ends meet, Mleczko sold bluefish—boating between five hundred and a thousand pounds per day—to Gliddens Seafood for 25 cents a pound. He and Bambi slowly built the business together, with her running the office and him running the trips. They put their three children—two daughters and a son—to work answering phones, booking trips and serving as first mates aboard their new boat, a twenty-nine-foot custom-built Crosby Hawk that Mleczko named Priscilla J after his wife.
Over the decades, Mleczko has had a lot of memorable clients, but few as historic as President George H.W. Bush, whom he fished with while Bush’s son was in the Oval Office. The logistics around taking a former U.S. president for an afternoon on the water redefined battening down the hatches. After an extensive background check, Mleczko waited at the dock for the president as frogmen dove under the boat to inspect the hull for explosives. Coast Guard jets and helicopters were deployed overhead.
President Bush arrived at the dock three hours late, causing them to miss the optimal tide to catch fish. Mleczko warned him that the fishing would be tough. Apart from the fact that they had missed the tide, he also thought that their floating entourage of Coast Guard, Town and Secret Service boats would spook all the fish. “I thought this boat was fast,” the president said. Mleczko said it was, but the other boats wouldn’t be able to keep up if he floored it. “Well, I’m the president of the United States,” Bush said. “Show me how fast it goes.” Not one to refuse an order from the commander in chief, Mleczko threw down the throttle, and they broke away from the flotilla, beating them to Old Man Shoal off the south shore by thirty minutes.
Just as Mleczko predicted, the fishing was indeed difficult. The president hooked into one bluefish on his fly-fishing rod, which abruptly broke during the fight. They landed the fish, but their time for the charter was up. Motoring back to the harbor, the president asked Mleczko if he could teach him how to tie some fishing knots. Mleczko handed the helm over and sat in the back of the boat for the rest of the ride, teaching the forty-first president of the United States how to thread a clinch knot. A tight friendship ensued.
Mleczko took President Bush out fishing the following summer. This time, the Secret Service shut down all of Great Point, creating a mile of open water around the bountiful fishing spot for Mleczko and the president to fish exclusively. “I’m going to get hell for this,” Mleczko muttered, seeing all the other boats being turned away. They boated a number of stripers that the president’s private chef prepared for lunch, which Mleczko and Bambi attended. They remained in contact with President Bush for many years thereafter, trading fishing stories.
Mleczko is a fisherman’s fisherman, salty, quick with a story and sturdy as his thirty-foot Crosby Hawk. He possesses a sixth sense for catching fish that has lured throngs of people to book him every summer for decades. From the helm of his boat, Mleczko has watched sons turn to fathers, fathers turn to grandfathers and grandfathers turn to the grave. The day before Hill Carter, a country doctor from Virginia who had chartered Mleczko since the seventies, passed away in his nineties, he was on the bow of the Priscilla J doing what he loved most.
Catching stripers often has required Mleczko to put his boat on the cusp of danger, backing into rips where the frothing white water could stack up as thick as snow. With watchful eyes darting from clients to breakers and back again, Mleczko is a master at reading the water and anticipating the wrath of the ocean. But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. The captain has taken his fair share of waves on the head.
“In the fall, you’d have hurricanes come through and you’d have huge water, but great fishing,” Mleczko reflected. During one of these autumn trips in the mid-eighties, he was navigating what captains called “The Opening,” the channel between Smith’s Point and Tuckernuck Island where Madaket Harbor gives way to the open Atlantic. Idling outside the breaker zone, Mleczko watched giant swells roll in and crash in sets of six. “I was brash enough at that point to think that we should do it,” he recalled.
Counting out the six waves, he throttled the boat into the breaker zone, only to see that there was a seventh wave to this set. The boat climbed up thirty feet of water, but there was still another ten feet to get past. The wave collapsed on them with punishing force. Priscilla J withstood the beating, but the clients didn’t. Reaching the safety outside the breaker zone, Mleczko got the rods ready to fish—but his clients said they had had enough. They wanted to get back on dry land as quickly as possible.
In 1996, Mleczko began expanding his fleet of boats and hiring more captains to run charters. His son, Jason, worked his way up from a striker to a captain. A strapping six-foot-four, Jason was a carbon copy of his father, utterly obsessed with fishing and excited as a golden retriever whenever he stepped aboard his boat. From their home office, Bambi could listen to her husband and son banter over the radio as they traded tips on where the bite was best. The father and son shared a supernatural bond on the water that ultimately proved to be lifesaving.
In 2013, Jason took a group of guys fishing on a blustery afternoon over Memorial Day weekend. They were outside of the protection of the harbor fishing a breaker zone known as the Bonito Bar, when a set of giant waves—what Jason described as “skyscrapers in a sea of houses”—came out of nowhere and flipped the boat. After getting pinned briefly under the boat, Jason managed to reach the surface and get all his clients back to the boat, which was now upside down and getting sucked out to sea by the outgoing tide. With darkness descending and hypothermia setting in, Jason’s and his company’s chances of survival dwindled with each passing minute. But Jason continued to rally the men, promising them that his father would come for them.
Tom Mleczko just so happened to be performing an ashes-spreading ceremony with some friends that day on the north shore. When Jason hadn’t checked in or responded to any of his calls, Mleczko went out looking for him. Amid all the fog and swells, he couldn’t make out anything on the horizon. No sign of Jason, he turned to return to the harbor. Unbeknownst to him, Jason could see him. He was waving furiously to get his attention. Mleczko turned to go. Jason’s heart sank. But just as he was about to return to the harbor, a tiny speck caught his eye. Mleczko turned hard to starboard, exploding through a wave and charging to the rescue of his son and his clients. It was the greatest catch of Captain Tom’s life.
More recently, Mleczko has stepped away from running charters. It’s not his aching knees that has lured him off the water, or a fading love of fishing. Four years ago, his wife of fifty years was diagnosed with progressive early onset Alzheimer’s. Mleczko became Bambi’s chief caregiver. “If that disease hadn’t injected itself into our lives, I’d still be fishing,” he said. “I do miss it a lot, but now I can sit back and pontificate as the admiral does in an advisory role.” With Jason taking over the business, Mleczko has been able to enjoy the summers for the first time, with his thirteen grandchildren, all of whom summer on their family’s compound on Hinckley Lane. He plans to return to chartering at some point to take out some of his longtime clients. When that day comes, he’ll climb aboard his trusty Priscilla J, the boat named in honor of his bride who made all of his fishing dreams possible.
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