Striped Bass, Weakfish And Fluke Are Here

Ready. Set. Go.

The fish are here. Not a lot, but more than the winter holdovers that have been picked at for the last month or so. Striped bass, some weakfish and even — if rumors stated as though they are fact can be believed — bluefish have been caught in local waters.

Weakfish reports are very, very scattered, but there are few being caught by the commercial traps in the bays and I did hear tell of a big tiderunner taken from a deep run in Shelter Island, so they are moving in.

I don’t know a lot of local sinker bouncers who bother much with the spring blackfish season, although many are eagerly awaiting the arrival of porgies in the Peconics. I’m sure that this weekend — the traditional porgy opener — there will be a bit of a fleet anchored up hoping to drop some plate-sized panfish in the bucket.

Fluke season officially opens next week (on a Tuesday, for some reason) as well, and from what the commercial draggers are saying, there are a fluke just off the beaches already. For those looking for a ride to the fluke grounds, all the local party boat fleets will be hitting the ground running next week. The LazyBones, Miss Montauk and Viking Fleet in Montauk, the Shinnecock Star and Hampton Lady in Shinnecock and the Peconic Star fleet up in Greenport will all be looking to get first licks in on the fluke and porgy for a reasonable fee.

The stripers in our area are still mostly very small, mico-bass at best, but there are a fair number of schoolies filling in around the creeks and on the ocean beaches. There is probably a fish here and there that would qualify as a keeper.

There are a lot of night owls creeping the shorelines these days in hope of being at the vanguard of the surfcasting season, and the texts from the darkness seem quite excited.

Along with the successes, those fishermen who have ventured out in search of these early arrival striped bass and weakfish have also found some very worrisome and sinister things on the bottom of the bay: bunker.

Bunker arrived in our waters about three weeks ago, and as soon as they did, the bay bottoms and shoreline were flecked with the silvery dead carcasses.

The die-off is not just local. The dead fish are littering the bay bottoms from here to South Jersey. It’s not on the scale of the die-offs we see in creeks when bunker suffocate themselves from over-crowding in shallow waters, but something is killing them very steadily. The state DEC biologists think it’s a bacteria, a fairly common one in marine waters, but they’re not sure where the bunker are picking it up or why it’s suddenly affecting them.

It is entirely possible that this issue with bunker is a product of their own success. Bacterial infections in animals are common when a species’ population gets “too big” in Mother Nature’s estimation. It’s her way of keeping things balanced. Humans have been screwing with her formula for so long that she rarely has to find ways to do it, but once in a while, when we leave something alone, the need arises.

Whether this is what is at play here with the bunker, I don’t know. It may well be another matter of human-caused environmental degradation.

How the die-off will affect the coming fishing season remains to be seen. Judging by the numbers of dead fish I’ve seen in our bays and harbors, I would say the problem is very bad, but not on a scale that is going to put a major dent in the gargantuan bunker schools, unless this rate of mortality continues steadily throughout the entire year.

The big question is, how will the bacteria affect the fish and birds that are eating these bunker. The ones that are sick and starting to die tend to flip and twirl around on the surface, just like a wounded bunker, and that makes them prime targets for predators. If this bacteria were to have the same effect on striped bass … I don’t even want to think about it.

The Shinnecock Marlin & Tuna Club, Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Long Island and Oakland’s Restaurant & Marina say that the annual Hamptons Offshore Invitational big game fishing tournament will return this August as usual after a one-year hiatus because of the pandemic.

The big awards gala will probably not be quite so big this year, but the crews will be on the boats and the engines will be rumbling, so that’s good news enough, for fishermen and the BBSLI that reaps the charitable benefits of the event.

Bluefin have been caught in the NY Bight, so the blood of tuna fishermen is boiling.

Catch ’em up. See you out there.