MENEMSHA – Buddy Vanderhoop is booked this week, but if, as expected, he gets a call from President Obama’s people, he’s taking it.
“Someone’s getting bumped,’’ Vanderhoop said yesterday. The colorful captain of Tomahawk Fishing Charters is the de facto guide to the stars on Martha’s Vineyard, and there’s no one better to help Obama snag a few king-size stripers than Vanderhoop. “It’s my job,’’ he said yesterday, scaling a 30-pound bass on his tiny dock in Menemsha. “I catch fish, and I catch a lot of them.’’ Just so happens that one of Vanderhoop’s good friends – and best clients – is Charles Ogletree, the distinguished Harvard law professor who is a confidante of the president’s. Ogletree has been out with Vanderhoop perhaps 30 times this summer, and he’ll be on board the captain’s 67-foot Bertram yacht if Obama goes fishing this week. (Yesterday, the commander in chief was back on the links, playing a round of golf at the public course Mink Meadows with his buddy Marvin Nicholson, Michael Ruemmler of the president’s advance team, and Sam Kass, who works in the White House kitchen.) “Ogletree is the Big Papi of bass fishing,’’ said Vanderhoop. “If my mate’s not around, Charles is right here scaling the fish with me.’’ A Native American, Vanderhoop is a member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah. He’s been fishing these waters for most of his 58 years, and he’s not the first in his family to land a big one: Vanderhoop’s great uncle, Amos Smalley, was the Wampanoag whaler who harpooned the White Whale believed to be Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.’’
“Buddy just seems to have a sense about where the fish are,’’ says his wife, Lisa, a photographer on the island. “It’s in his blood.’’