August Means Snapper Season

I love writing this column the week that the photos from the local snapper derbies start rolling in. For me, there is nothing that says August in the Hamptons more than snapper fishing in the local bays.

The walls of the Shinnecock Canal or other local harbors where snappers congregate in summer were really where most local anglers first caught the fishing bug.

Judging from my own family’s photo history, my dad and grandmother started taking me to the canal to catch snappers when I was 6 or 7. By the time I was 8 or 9 I was riding my bike on my own to Altenkirchs, where I had to have Mickey call my mother to tell her I’d arrived. A few years later we started going to the Peconic Beach Club, and while other kids took sailing lessons from Robbie Stelling, I headed down to the cut into Cold Spring Pond to catch snappers with Danny Casela and Rob Carr.

Those were the days before snapper poppers, and we mostly fished with shiners on the old school two-hook drail rigs under a big red bobber. Sometimes we’d throw on a Sidewinder or Kastmaster, but really when you are kid you love the anticipation of watching that bobber, waiting for it to start bouncing or, when the snappers were getting big toward Labor Day, disappearing entirely beneath the surface.

Snappers are the perfect break-in fish for young fishermen. Yes, they are pretty easy to catch, but they also present challenges in a gentle manner that molds a young fisherman or fisherwoman. With an artificial like a Kastmaster you do have to have a little finesse to hook them, so it starts you out on learning how to work a lure. They also already have the teeth that their adult selves will and dorsal spines so they command some attention, without posing a threat of a trip to the emergency room.

Of course, in the days I was snapper fishing, there were no limits on how many we could keep, and a day’s success was measured by how many stiff snappers were in your bucket at the end of a session (yes, they are also a good entré to filleting fish). I suppose we are paying the price for that now.

Snapper fishing has been OK this year. That is to say, it’s better than some recent years when they were basically nonexistent. It’s a faint whisper of the old days, but there are decent numbers of them in the bays and the Southampton Town Snapper Derby last week had a good turnout, so there are more young fishermen and fisherwomen being introduced the sport. Perhaps we should be encouraging using snapper fishing as an introduction to catch-and-release fishing also, since three fish per person — so six tiny fillets — is hardly a meal in the making.

Maybe the dwindled numbers of snappers will mean that the future anglers learning the sport today will be forced to learn the more subtle nuances of tricking a fish into biting faster than those of us spoiled with easy fishing.

In other news, fluke fishing is still pretty easy in Montauk. There’s a lot of nice fishing coming up from a lot of different places, and a Montauk charter or party boat is an easy way to ring up a limit and maybe even hang a doormat.

The Shinnecock bite has been up and down. There are more fish around the reef now, enough to be worth putting in a full tide and plenty of big ones coming up if you are looking for a jumbo. The bay fishing has been very hit and miss — lots of fish but a lot of shorts to filter through to get your keepers so if you’re fishing Gulp it can be a costly venture. Single spearing is probably a more cost-effective approach right now.

The good striped bass fishing is all up by Block Island or Rhode Island coast these days, but there are some schoolies and a keeper here and there to be had in the bays and in the Montauk surf.

A few bonito have started popping up along the sand beaches and around the inlets, though not enough to target reliably quite yet. I haven’t seen a Spanish mackerel come up locally but I’m told there are tons in Long Island Sound — which sorta shocked me to hear, thinking they were a pelagic fish that would never find their way that far inshore.

I’m sure the most intrepid false albacore hounds are already hunting for signs of them. They showed up about this time last year and there’s been tons of them out on the yellowfin grounds. Just a matter of the bait balling up and them coming along to find it.

The 23rd Hamptons Offshore Invitational saw some trophy tunas come to the scales.

Coercion took the big prize with the two biggest bigeye tuna, at 249 and 226 pounds.

Gunite had the third place bigeye as well as the largest yellowfin — a whopping 180-pound Gulf Stream trophy rarely seen in these parts.

White Water and Canyon Bound had the next two largest yellowfin, at 94 and 92 pounds.

Persuasion and Miss White Water took the top longfin albacore trophy with matching 61.5-pounders.

Slim Shady had the biggest mahi, at 26 pounds, followed by Two Docks’ 22-pounder and Syndey Bell’s 19.5-pounder.

A small field in the tournament this year for whatever reason still raised a bunch of money for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Long Island, so thanks to all the captains and organizers of the tournament.

Till next year, catch ’em up. See you out there.