Limits for Shark Fishing From Shore Are Coming

Fishing has continued to be outstanding the last couple of weeks.

Up in the Peconics, striped bass, bluefish, weakfish and porgies are still lingering as waters warm.

The rips under the Montauk Lighthouse are loaded with stripers, from 5 pounds to 50 pounds.

Large stripers have started to show up under the bunker schools in the ocean off Hampton Bays, Southampton and East Hampton.

Hatches of cinder worms and grass shrimp have had the stripers feeding in the creeks.

The offshore scene also is heating up. Ambitious crews from Shinnecock and Moriches have been ranging out to the warm water pushing into the canyons and finding plenty of big tunas — topped out by the 500-pound bluefin caught by Kevin Norden this past week.

Fluke fishing has continued to be slow, and black sea bass season remains closed, making for some very frustrating days on the drift, but the persistent sinker bouncers are putting a few fillets on ice here and there.

New York State still has not imposed the new striped bass slot limit — they have until July 2 to do so — so for the time being 28 to 35 inches is still the rule.

The state has introduced some new rules for the increasingly popular pastime of fishing for sharks from the surf, which would not go into effect this summer but will be the subject of public hearings in August.

The rule would ban the use of artificial lures for shark fishing, as well as the use of J-hooks 9/0 or larger, or circle hooks 11/0 or larger, as well as wire leaders longer than 12 inches. No chumming would be allowed, and baits would not be allowed to be deployed by any means other than casting (think drones, kites or surfboards).

Fishing for sharks from the New York surf has become something of a fad over the last few years, driven mostly by the explosion of shark numbers along our shores and the popularity of a handful of Instagram accounts populated with photos of arching rod bends, athletic battle poses, dramatic landing scenes and jaws-open cheese photos.

In Florida, where shark fishing from shore has been a popular thing for a while, there are a few fishermen who kill the sharks they catch and clean them for the table (or claim to, anyway).

But in New York it’s almost exclusively catch-and-release fishing, because most of the species of sharks that one might catch from shore around here are protected from harvest.

Of the five species of sharks that make up the vast majority of sharks caught from the beach — dusky, brown, sand tiger, spinner and thresher — only the thresher and spinner are allowed to be harvested under New York State’s fishing regulations.

Browns, duskys and sand tigers are what are known as coastal sharks, which are protected as a class of fish. Threshers, like makos and tiger sharks, are pelagic sharks, which are subject to individual harvest rules in both state and federal waters. Right now, makos are off limits, too, after what was apparently a stunning population decline in the last several years.

I’ve never heard of anyone keeping a spinner shark, but threshers are excellent eating and the species would appear to be fairly healthy.

The State Department of Environmental Conservation’s proposed approach is a work-around to simply saying that you can’t fish for brown sharks and dusky sharks, because an angler can just say they are fishing for a pelagic shark like a thresher and caught a coastal shark by accident.

At first blush, the rules don’t seem wholly unreasonable. The banning of the use of artificial lures may be a bit much. In Florida, catching sharks on lures — topwater poppers, primarily — is a favorite seasonal fishery. I caught a thresher on a spook last summer — well, I hooked one, anyway — so it is doable. But even with all the explosive shark feeding that’s been going on off our shores the last few years, I have yet to see any evidence of a targeted lure fishery developing.

Maintaining protections for sharks when their numbers seem to be exploding up and the down the East Coast is taking a lot of flak. Sharks have become major pests on the fishing grounds in Florida, where they are taking a lot of hooked fish, posing a complicated new calculation for regulators trying to keep tabs on how fishing is impacting stocks of various species. But that is not really the sharks’ fault, is it?

For this summer, anyway, catch ’em up. See you out there.