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In honor of election week—and in celebration of the merciful end of election season—I’m going to declare November the swing vote on the Northeast fishing season. This is the month that can make or break our season as we prepare for the marathon of winter. It’s the month that can grant our most fabulous wishes or dash our most groveling hopes.
If the fishing is red hot in November it can push an already good season into the legendary realm, or it can salvage a slow fall. If the fishing is bad, it leaves anglers with a listless, sad start to the long off-season.
November can be a quixotic month in the Northeast. It might be a month of 70-degree temps. It might be a month of 20-degree temps. Or both.
You can have those blustery east wind days that push the stripers into the wash and spur marina owners to get out the shrink wrap, or you can have days of light, warm, winds that have the surf rats breaking out the fly gear and the offshore crowd running for the canyons.
October was tumultuous, weather-wise. We’re due for a break.
The surf scene continued on its steady cycle of production. The rock hoppers in Montauk are still crushing the schoolie bass just about every day. The sand eels are still scattered along the sand beaches and the suds in East Hampton, Southampton and Quogue have produced some decent numbers and sizes just about every day. There are bigger fish to be had for those willing to keep up the night patrol.
It doesn’t look as though the canyon scene is going to serenade us with a final song this year—the big temp break at Veatchs last month never slid over our canyons. There was a good bite of medium-size swordfish along the edge at the Fish Tails the last couple weeks, but few tuna to speak of.
The bluefin are still presenting us with a lot of hope for this month. The week around Thanksgiving can be a great one for the bluefin bite off Montauk as the giants break from their fall grounds off Cape Cod—if the weather lets us at them.
Last week the National Marine Fisheries Service released its bluefin tuna landings statistics for the first three quarters of the year, and the counts showed another big jump in the number of tuna landed this year by U.S. flagged vessels from last year. Through the end of September, American fishermen have landed 1,746 “large” and “giant” bluefin—that’s fish 73 inches and bigger—and that doesn’t even include the fish caught during the red hot bite off Chatham in October that is sure to add another 150 fish or more to that tally. During the same nine-month period in 2008, U.S. fishermen landed just 991 fish, and that had been an improvement over the year prior.
The numbers are encouraging for fishermen, even though the U.S. fleet is still on pace to fall woefully short of even its quota of western Atlantic bluefin. The second year of the limited closure of the Gulf of Maine to mid-water trawlers looks to be paying dividends in another bountiful supply of herring on the tuna grounds and with that comes the good tuna action.
There has been a lot of hemming and hawing on the fisheries discussion boards of half-a-dozen websites about the listing of bluefin on the endangered species list. Some environmental groups have pushed for the listing hoping it will spur European countries to get a handle on the greedy slaughter of bluefin that goes on in the Mediterranean each year. But U.S. fishermen seem to think it will just mean our fishery gets shut down while the already lawless derby that goes on in the Med will just continue unabated because of lax enforcement and rampant disregard for the resource on the part of fishermen.
If we could be confident that our supply of bluefin—technically looked at as a separate stock of fish from the European one—was not affected by the eastern massacres, the U.S. and Canada could take a more ideological stand against the Europeans and let our fishermen keep fishing with the tight controls already in place (the North American haul of bluefin is something like 6,000 metric tons this year—the Europeans will kill close to 40,000 metric tons). But since we know that western Atlantic fish cross the ocean to mingle with the eastern fish, we probably do not have that luxury.
Closing the bluefin fishery, just when it’s showing signs of life, is an almost unbearable thought for someone who has chased these magnificent beasts at sea, or those who make their living off the same pursuit.
With luck, we’ll get a shot at the bluefins off Montauk again this month. And we have to hope it won’t be the last time.
Catch ’em up, folks. See you out there.
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