The Summer Of Tuna, Not Sharks

This has really been a summer for the tunas. The inshore yellowfin tuna fishing has never been better, and this is the first year when catching them on spinning gear with popper and diamond jigs has really become almost the preferred method.

The canyon fishing close to Long Island hasn’t been that great, but for the big guns with the juice to reach Veatch and Hydrographers canyons — 150-plus miles from Montauk and Shinnecock — the cobalt Gulf Stream water that has been parked there all summer has provided some great fishing, including a recent appearance by giant yellowfin tuna the likes of which we don’t usually see near our coast.

Combine this with another year of giant bluefin fishing that I hesitate to call “easy,” but it was certainly a heck of a lot easier than it can be for much of July and early August. (The only difference from last year’s unprecedented/unbelievable Rockaway Reef bite being that the fish set up in the waters between Montauk and Shinnecock, where there were a lot fewer boats targeting them.)

What has caused the tuna rebound? There’s a few possibilities:

First is conservation, and this certainly is the main source of the rebound in bluefin tuna. The “fix” to the bluefin fishery is still less than 30 years old, and we’re still really seeing the benefits of shutting down the purse-sein fishery for small bluefins that swallowed up entire schools of fish to supply cat food factories. Once we stopped doing that, and controlling the slaughter of bluefins in other regions of the Atlantic, the fish have found their footing again.

Conservation seems less likely to have impacted the pelagic tunas like yellowfins and bigeyes, since they are spread so far around the ocean. It’s possible that some of the conservation measures to help rebuild swordfish stocks by closing longline fishing near breeding grounds has helped bigeyes come back too, but that might be a stretch.

So it’s possible that return of bigeyes and lots of yellowfins to our waters is just a cycle. We only really started fishing for pelagic tunas south of Long Island in the 1960s and 1970s, when the bluefin started to dwindle. That’s not very long in the timetable of Mother Nature’s cycles, so we don’t really know how often fishing will be good for a decade or two, then be very poor for the same amount of time.

The bad thing about the cycle theory is that it means what we are enjoying now will inevitably end, possibly for the rest of some of our fishing lives — this thinking gives me agita every time I miss a good day on the tuna grounds.

It’s possible that changes in the bait abundance is driving the tuna surge. Sandeels seem to be the main driver of the tuna fishing. Sandeels are a coastal species that are highly cyclical themselves.

Or it’s possible that there have been more tuna around for longer than we realize, and we’ve just gotten better at finding them and catching them. Social media driving more anglers to sea in search is certainly playing a role.

I think back decades ago, when the tuna fishing along the 30- and 40-fathom curve was very good. But maybe we just didn’t realize what we were missing. Maybe the yellowfin were swimming along with every pod of dolphin, around every whale, we saw back then, too, and we just didn’t realize it.

For many of us, this week marks a cause for celebration on the tuna fishing front: The tiniest of our tunas have returned. False albacore — albies, in the local parlance — arrived in the waters off Montauk on Sunday. For small-boat, light-tackle enthusiasts, this is an annual milestone that we look forward to as much as kids do Christmas. Fingers crossed that we get a good 90 days of albies this year.

With the albies’ arrival, we should start to see schoolie striped bass form up into blitzes in Montauk waters soon also.

In other realms, fluke fishing has continued to be excellent. The Montauk deeps have been the most reliable, with limits of nice big fish a fairly easy prospect. The Shinnecock Reef has been pretty good, too, if you put in your time.

There’s also a ton of squid around, and a couple of local party boats have taken to offering squid fishing trips. The Hampton Lady in Hampton Bays (hamptonladyfishing.com) has been doing nightly trips to load up on calamari — or fluke bait, depending on your priorities. I used to get a carton of squid from a dragger every spring to vac-pac for fluke bait and would pluck the tentacles out and fry those, freezing just the tubes. Try it out.

Whatever your direction, catch ’em up. See you out there.