Summer Season Finally Catches Up With a Fishing Season in Full Swing Already

Welcome to Summer 2023.

For those just arriving on the South Fork for the season, you have missed quite a bit on the fishing scene already. But you’re walking into some spectacular fishing on many fronts. So don’t spend too much time unpacking — it’s time to hit the beach or get out on the water.

While the striped bass stock is in crummy condition overall, you would never know it by the numbers of them that have settled into our local waters already. Montauk, in particular, is chockablock with stripers from 5 pounds to 50 pounds right now, and they are hungry, hungry hippos.

This is the second year in a row that big numbers of migratory stripers have moved into Montauk waters much earlier than they historically have. There’s always been an early May push of stripers, including some big ones, into the Peconics and back bays where bunker schools are hiding. But the Montuak rips often didn’t really hold significant numbers of fish until well into June.

Not so this year. The shadow of the Montauk Lighthouse is already teeming with bass, from shorts to fish into the 30-pound class. Boats are having the most success, trolling wire, diamond jigging and bouncing bucktails, but surf fishermen have had their shots of excellent fishing, too, along the “North Side” in the evenings and wee hours.

Don’t forget that because of the emergency rules change made by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission earlier this month, the “slot” size of a keeper striped bass is about to be cut way down. The new maximum size is 31 inches for the rest of the year — not the 35 inches that is printed on a lot of rules books and brochures. The minimum size is still 28 inches, so the new slot is very narrow and does not represent a portion of the fish stock that has a huge number of fish in it. So finding a legal “keeper” this year is going to be difficult.

It would be nice to see tackle shops post this new rule on the doors to their shops so that anglers will be reminded over and over again. Education and enforcement of this new rule is going to be hard.

I will say this, as someone who loves eating striped bass almost more than any other fish: The sacrifice now will be worth it in the long run. We need the 2015 year-class to grow up and grow old, because the way the stock is arranged right now, in four or five years there are going to be very few large fish, and anyone who is a striper hound knows that really big striped bass are what drives the fishery for a large segment of the fishing community.

This is also the second straight year of outstanding weakfish fishing. We’re not exactly back to the days of the 1970s and 1980s, with the enormous Shinnecock Canal runs and giant weakfish lurking in the deep holes of the Peconics, but there is no denying that there are a ton of weakfish around right now.

The fish have been in most of their old haunts, with good numbers coming from the eastern Peconics and Noyac Bay, and some finding their way through Shinnecock and Moriches inlets and into the canals and creeks that branch off the bays. Squid strips on hi-lo rigs will do the trick, as will any small, soft plastic on a light jighead.

If you are shorebound, the walls of the Quogue and Shinnecock canals are probably your best bet, at the fringes of the tides and in the early mornings and evenings.

While many are quick to say that this is the start of a rebound for weakfish, I’m not holding my breath. I tend to agree more with those who point out that over the last 40 years weakfish have pulled this kind of resurgence a few times, only to vanish again after a few years — sometimes for a decade or more.

This current surge is definitely the best, at least in terms of numbers, since the early 2000s. That upswing lasted basically two seasons, and then we had a few years where some really big weakfish were caught, but not really all that many.

For the last two weeks, the eastern end of the Peconics has been pretty much the epicenter of fishing, not just because of the weakfish run but because of the great porgy run and the schools of huge bluefish annihilating anything that moves near them.

Fluke fishing has been the terrible-to-mediocre showing that has come to define our spring fishing over the last decade or so. I’m not sure what has changed that we simply do not see fluke come into near-shore ocean waters or Shelter Island Sound in May and June like they used to do so reliably, but whatever it is, it’s a shame. Weakfish are keeping things interesting right now, but if not for them, it would mean short days on the water with quick limits of porgies and then not much else worth working at.

For the offshore gang, the big pelagic fish are just starting to show up. Some boats that shot out to a beautiful eddy of Gulf Stream water spinning inshore east of Montauk last week found lots of hungry tuna. That fishery should gradually pick up over the next few weeks.

Whatever your flavor, get after it while the getting is good.

Catch ’em up. See you out there.