A TASTE OF DROUGHT

This Columbus Day weekend, I was supposed to take a group of outdoor writers shark fishing south of Shinnecock (Long Island, New York) Inlet.

A howling northeast wind didn’t let that happen, and we didn’t have many other options.  There were a lot of false albacore around, but most of those were also outside.  And there were a bunch of porgies (a/k/a “scup”) in Peconic Bay, but with the northeast wind blowing right between the forks and piling up a rough sea, that wasn’t really an option either. 

So we turned around and spent two days fishing in Shinnecock Bay, where the results weren’t much to—in this case literally—write home about. 

One of the other boats did get a single false albacore inside the bay, and the smallest boat of the group managed to nose up onto a shallow flat and find a few short stripers.  But the writers on board all of our boats spent most of their time catching sea robins, interspersed with a few small, out-of-season fluke, a bluefish and one foul-hooked blowfish.

The wind also forced us to cancel a planned light-tackle excursion to Montauk.  Fortunately, the guide out there is also a very experienced surfcaster, who was willing to take a couple of writers out on the beach.  After spending the day running about 20 miles of sand, and stopping to fish at any point where there was reason to hope, their total catch amounted to just one six or seven pound bluefish.

Columbus Day weekend is also the time when Long Island surfcasting clubs meet for their annual Gathering of Anglers/Korkers’ Cup Tournament.  When the event was held this year, well, I’ll let a writer from Surfcaster’s Journal say how it went.

“…If I could pick ONE weekend a year in January where I would be 99.9% sure fishing is going to be at least decent in Montauk through the course of the entire year I would pick Columbus Day weekend.

“Not for the size or the numbers, just because it’s always been productive for me.  Yeah, I’ve gotten skunk here or there but others found plenty of fish somewhere else.

“…So which club won, what was the biggest fish and biggest combined score.

“No one won.

“There was not a SINGLE fish caught or entered into contest.

“I’ll repeat that one more time.

“Not a Single Eligible Striped Bass was caught during the entire weekend by any of the participating clubs…”

That’s just not how October is supposed to be.

It’s not that the bass are entirely missing.  There has been a decent sand eel bite off some of the Hamptons beaches over the last few weeks.  But a decent bite, along one section of beach, does not make a season.  I stopped by a Bay Shore tackle shop a few days ago, and the pained look on the owner’s face as he shook his head and told a customer that there were only a few small bluefish and a handful of stripers around spoke volumes about what is going on. 

And it’s not only stripers that are scarce.  Along most of the coast, bluefish have been missing in action this season, with only a few pockets of big fish, and spurts of “cocktails” weighing less than three pounds. 

Earlier this month, some of the local party boats had even resorted to targeting blowfish and triggerfish inside the bay, because with the summer flounder (“fluke”) season closed, few legal black sea bass on the inshore wrecks and not may stripers or blues around, they didn’t have any other options.  

At one time, they could have filled their fares buckets with winter flounder, but they disappeared a long time ago.

I got an invitation to go fishing for tautog (“blackfish”) in Long Island Sound a couple of days ago, and things weren’t too much better up there.  Once again, a combination of a stiff wind and relatively small boat kept us from fishing the more productive pieces on the Connecticut side, but there were still a number of small rockpiles that should have produced some action.  They didn’t. 

Despite the fact that I was fishing with a knowledgeable local angler, we only found one undersized tautog after hours of fishing; fortunately, we did run into some oversized porgies that assured a fish dinner that night. 

There’s no question that, on a less-windy day, we would have put a few tautog in the box, but even so, it’s tough to argue that there were enough of them around to justify the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission's decision to allow Long Island Sound tautog to endure overfishing for at least another ten years.

The bottom line is that, here on Long Island, fall fishing is not very good, and that the current slow fall is coming after a summer that wasn’t, on the whole, very good either, particularly for the smaller, slower party boats that couldn’t venture out to the offshore wrecks, for the surfcasters, and for the smaller private boats that need to remain in or close to the bay.

Yes, there were some very large fluke caught, but thanks to at least six years of poor reproduction, the overall numbers of fish weren’t very good, and the number of barely-legal-size fish that usually make up most of the recreational harvest was discouragingly low. 

There were hordes of black sea bass on the wrecks, but most of them were very small.  Fishing reports from the local party boat fleet saw anglers sorting through far too many black sea bass just to keep their three-fish summer limits.  

And a lot of those legal black sea bass weren’t caught close to home. 

I do some wreck fishing each season, and spend a lot of time offshore chasing sharks, and I don’t recall ever seeing so many of the local party boats regularly traveling 10 or 15 miles from the inlet during the summer, just to find fish for their fares.  That kind of traveling burns a lot of fuel over the course of the season, and no one likes to do it if they can put fish in their customers’ coolers much closer to the dock. 

And for the first time this summer, I saw some of the boats advertising wreck trips targeting not black sea bass, but ling (more properly, red hake), a species which has traditionally been a last-resort fish for the winter fleet when the cod disappeared, and doesn't normally support a directed summer fishery.

When one looks at the overall picture, Long Island’s inshore anglers experienced a touch of drought this season.   The Fisherman magazine even added the humble sea robin, once shunned as a “trash fish,” as an eligible species in its “Dream Boat Contest,” which, as a sign of the times, is more than a little discouraging.

Yes, there were plenty of porgies, and some places and times when fishing for other species was good.  But those intervals of good action were like summer showers that bring a little temporary relief, but don’t signal any real change in the weather.

So as this season winds down and we look to the next, we have to ask ourselves what the future will be.

Will we get relief from the drought, or will our waters slowly become a desert?

In 1981, New York’s anglers took home over 37,000,000 fish.  One-third of those fish—well over 12,000,000—were winter flounder, a fish that has all but disappeared from local waters.  Another quarter—more than 9,000,000—were porgies, with bluefish, at just under 9,000,000, also dominating the landings.  Summer flounder accounted for about 7% of the landings, tautog for a little more than 4% and black sea bass for just about 1%.

With the loss of New York’s winter flounder, much of that has changed.  In 2017, anglers landed just under 16,000,000 fish (not counting over 2,000,000 unclassified herring, just about all of which were probably menhaden).  More than 40% of that was made up of just one fish, scup or “porgies.”  Another 19% was comprised of bluefish, 15% was black sea bass and 7% was summer flounder.  About 3% was striped bass.

New York anglers are already bringing home less than half as many fish as they did 36 years ago.  The loss of the winter flounder fishery, in itself, accounts for about 57% of the difference; a decline in the landings of just two other species, scup and bluefish (mostly the latter), accounts for almost all of the rest.

So the question anglers, and angling-related businesses need to ask is, “Can we afford to lose anything else?”

There’s no question that the loss of the winter flounder fishery badly hurt Long Island’s recreational fishing industry.  A season that used to begin at the beginning of March, when the first few party boats began fishing for flounder, now doesn’t begin until early May, when the first fluke and striped bass fishing kicks into gear.  And inshore bottom fishermen who once fished for flounder into December now see their season end when fluke closes down in late September, unless they want to try to winkle out a handful of tautog from inshore structure.

Does it make sense to take as many scup, black sea bass, stripers and blues as we can today, while we can?  Or should we be willing to accept a somewhat lower catch, and perhaps lower incomes in the short term, in order to keep our fisheries, and our fishing-related businesses, viable well into the future?

Opinions differ.

But as NMFS prepares to open federal waters to striped bass harvest, and ASMFC considers increasing the striped bass kill, as the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and ASMFC weigh the possibility of reducing the recreational bluefish quota to increase commercial landings, as sectors within the angling community clamor for a bigger black sea bass kill and conservation issues become an afterthought, anglers should ask themselves one thing:

Did they enjoy this year’s small taste of drought enough to want to have it for their every meal?