2026: A CHILL IN THE AIR

 

As I write this, we’re more than two months into the 2026 fishing season—dating from the opening of winter flounder on April 1—and things aren’t looking too good.

To be fair, it was a cold—or, as those of us who lived through the last half of the 20^th Century might say, “normal”—winter, with below-freezing temperatures and a few rounds of snow, which pushed down water temperatures and delayed the start of the season.  But even so, there’s a cold wind blowing off the water that has nothing to do with the winter, for saltwater fishing here on Long Island has gotten off to a very slow start, a start slow enough to cause a bit of worry for anglers and for angler-dependent businesses.

How slow is slow?

Let’s put it this way:  I belong to the South Shore Marlin and Tuna Club, an organization made up of a little under 100 members, along with their wives and kids under 18.  The members tend to be very active, capable fishermen, and despite the club’s name, do a lot of fishing inshore.  Like many clubs, they hold annual and monthly contests, where members weigh in their fish in hopes of winning a modest prize.  As of last Tuesday night’s meeting, precisely two fish were weighed in so far—one very nice blackfish (more properly, “tautog”) of more than 9 pounds, and a very surprising 12-pound dolphin that one of the members caught on an exploratory trip to Hudson Canyon last April.

Not a single fish—not a bluefish, nor a flounder, nor a fluke, nor a striped bass, nor a weakfish, nor a black sea bass—was weighed in during the entire month of May, and the first nine days of June didn’t produce any better.

That’s pretty slow.

The absence of winter flounder was completely predictable, as the population crashed a couple of decades ago, and no one—not the National Marine Fisheries Service/New England Fisheries Management Council, not the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, and not the State of New York—made any serious effort to keep that from happening.  So recreational landings fell from about 14.5 million in 1984 to somewhere between zero and 2,131 last year; so few were actually taken in 2025 that it was impossible to calculate a more precise number.

At one time, winter flounder were an important economic driver of New York’s recreational fishing industry.  In 1984, the state’s anglers took nearly 3.5 million fishing trips primarily targeting the species, with about 284,000 of those trips taken aboard party and charter boats, which started their flounder season in early March and finished up in December.  Last year, so few trips were taken that the estimate of angling effort was meaningless.

This April, an enterprising party boat operator in the former flounder mecca of Moriches Bay decided to offer what he called an “exploratory” flounder trip

“this Saturday 4/18 from 12-3:30pm.  Haven’t tried in many years but we’re gonna give it a shot!”

After the fact, he reported that

“No luck on the flounder today.  We fished a few old school spots and at least gave it a shot.  Water temps in the low 50’s still.  We might try one more time before the fluke opener when the water warms up a bit.”

To the best of my knowledge, he never made the second try, and it’s probably just as well, as New York’s winter flounder population is barely hanging on, leaving a big hole in the business models of party boats and tackle shops from New York City to Montauk. 

The spring tautog fishery was typically slow, with just a few fish being caught.  Although the health of the Long Island Sound population is steadily improving, the New Jersey/New York Bight population, which extends from Orient Point to southern New Jersey, is still experiencing overfishing.  Thus, at the August ASMFC meeting, the Tautog Management Board is expected to approve a draft addendum for public comment, which will propose ways to reduce fishing mortality of New Jersey/New York Bight tautog by 40%, in order to reduce fishing mortality to the target level by 2030.  While we don’t yet know what sort of management measures will be needed to achieve that goal, we can guess that the reductions in the bag limit and/or seasons will be substantial (the Management Board decided that the minimum size will remain unchanged).

As far as other early season fisheries go, the Atlantic mackerel that once swarmed along the South Shore of Long Island, and invaded Long Island Sound from the mid-1960s to, perhaps, 1990 or so were just taken off the “overfished” list less than three months ago, but the stock is still rebuilding; the runs that used to fill Long Island Sound and the nearshore ocean with fish a few decades ago are still just a memory, although anglers are again beginning to run into some big mackerel schools in the Sound.  Unfortunately, the Southern New England stock of Atlantic cod remains badly overfished, mostly by anglers, which has resulted in the recreational season being completely closed.

So, outside of some ling (more properly, “red hake”). it doesn’t appear that spring fishing opportunities are going to get better any time soon, which is news that the shops and the for-hire boats probably don’t want to hear.

For a while, it looked like weakfish might provide a little more early-season action.  Although the fishing hasn’t been what anyone might call “hot,” for the past five years or so, we’ve seen a steady improvement on the South Shore of Long Island, even though the stock is still considered “depleted,” with spawning stock biomass less than one-third of its target level; much of the problem is attributed to high levels of natural mortality.

But this year, the trajectory of the weakfish stock seemed to head back down, with far fewer being caught.  At first, we blamed it on the cold water slowing down the migration and making the fish reluctant to bite, even though the water wasn’t really any colder than it was thirty years ago, when the weakfish started biting around the first week of May.  For the past few years, my fishing club has held a week-long weakfish contest sometime in May.  This year, it was scheduled to run from the 11^th through the 17^th, and when the weakfish didn’t show, it was rescheduled for the 25^th through the 31^st, to give the water a chance to warm.  When everyone got skunked anyway, they just held the afterparty, drank the beer and ate the burgers, and hoped they’ll do better next year.

That doesn’t mean that there were no weakfish around at all, but the catches have been disappointing, and while it’s far too early to know whether the stock has begun to decline, based on what we’re seeing so far, things are not looking good.  One South Shore party boat fleet—two boats in all—that’s usually pretty successful at catching whatever’s around, reports catching just two weakfish this season, fish that they blundered into while targeting fluke. 

Neither the boats nor the shops are making much money on weakfish this year.

On the other hand, the folks at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center are telling us that the once-overfished bluefish are recovering nicely, and should be fully rebuild ahead of schedule; they might have already rebuilt last season, but we won’t know for certain until the next stock assessment update comes out in 2027.  That seems like good news.

The only minor problem is that, if the bluefish stock has rebuilt, no one is particularly sure where they’re hiding.  Scattered pods are passing through, but the days when schools of small blues rampaged through the bays for most of May, terrorizing the bait and the ripping up soft plastic lures intended for weakfish, have not yet returned.  The same party boat fleet mentioned before has only reported catching 75 bluefish so far this season, a total that pales when compared to previous years.

Montauk usually sees some pretty good bluefishing around the Memorial Day weekend, and for a few weeks after, but this year seems an exception to the rule.  Long Island Sound is also unusually quiet, and while I haven’t been offshore yet, so can’t say for certain what’s happening there, with the exception of a few 12-inch fish during the first week of July 2023, I haven’t had a bluefish in my shark slicks since 2017, even in places where they used to make it impossible to put a bait in the water, so I doubt that our offshore waters are filled with the things.

Which all makes me wonder whether the 2027 stock assessment update will be as optimistic as the last one was.

And then there are the bottom fish.

Cold ocean water definitely slowed down the start of the season, with fluke, scup, and black sea bass all having less than stellar opening days. 

Scup are probably doing the best of the three major species, with the last stock assessment finding spawning stock biomass at 322% of the biomass target; the only cause for any concern is that recruitment seems to have declined sharply over the past couple of years; the most recent assessment estimated the median annual number of recruits to be 135,400,000, but data for 2023 and 2024 showed recruitment at only 39,724,000 and 15,706,000 fish, respectively.  If the 2027 assessment update shows a continuation of that trend, and fishing mortality remains unchanged, spawning stock biomass could start heading downhill pretty quickly.

So far this year, along most of Long Island, scup haven’t lived up to their seeming potential.  The South Shore has been pretty quiet; the party boat fleet that I mentioned before has caught only eight since the season opened on the 1^st of May, although another fleet, docked at the same port, which does a lot of deeper-water wreck fishing has caught 35 since June 1 (I tend to use party boats as a gauge of fish abundance because they fish multiple times per week, sometimes every day, and their captains and mates tend to be good fishermen, putting the party boat customers in a very good position to catch anything that might be around).

The western Long Island Sound hasn’t been setting the scup world on fire, but the central Sound—the area off Pt. Jefferson—has recently been hot, so good that it is drawing eastern Connecticut boats from as much as 45 miles away, and at least one Montauk boat, too—although the fact that boats are traveling that far to catch porgies suggests that the eastern Sound and East End might not be holding as many fish as they typically do.

Along with scup, anglers are catching black sea bass.  Again, we’re dealing with a fish at a very high level of abundance—spawning stock biomass is 284% of the biomass target.  The problem is that almost all of those fish are small.  The Recreational Demand Model run last year, used to predict the sizes of fish that will be available to anglers this season, revealed that less than 10% of the population is five or more years old, and a five-year-old sea bass is only about 15 inches long, still an inch below New York’s minimum size.  A truncated age structure, that sees few fish grow to larger sizes and older ages, is often a sign that too many fish are being removed from the stock. 

And, beyond that, fishing all day trying to catch three legal black sea bass is not a particularly exciting thing to do.  So far, I haven’t been able to convince myself that it’s worth burning $125 in diesel to do it, and I suspect that other anglers feel about the same.

The triad of bottom fish ends with fluke (summer flounder), which is going through almost a mirror image of what scup and black sea bass are experiencing; the last stock assessment update estimated spawning stock biomass to be just 83% of the biomass target, largely because of sub-par recruitment since around 2010.  But median annual recruitment for summer flounder is estimated to be 46,626,000 fish, and recruitment for 2022, 2023, and 2024 was estimated at 42,112,000, 52,873,000, and 49,649,000 fish, respectively—one just-below average and two mildly above average years in a row.  Since it usually takes four years for a fluke to grow into New York’s 19-inch minimum size, fishing ought to be a little better this year than it was in the recent past—despite this year’s slow start—and continue to improve through 2027 and 2028.

That’s probably the best news of any that we’ve looked at so far.

But, of course, there’s still the striped bass to consider.

In his 19^th Century novel, A Tale of Two Cities, English author Charles Dickens wrote,

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

The same could be said of the current state of the striped bass.

If an angler looks just at the present, and gauges the quality of the fishing by the number of big fish available, today’s striped bass fishery isn’t far from the best of times, with a relative abundance of 40 and even 50 pound fish, along with quite a few 30s, 20s, and teens.  Those who want to take a fish home can still find enough bass from the 2018 year class—the last above-average year class produced in the critically important Maryland spawning grounds—to put fish in the cooler.

Based on that abundance of bigger fish, too many anglers foolishly hope that all is well and that the good fishing will continue, and fail to heed biologists’ warnings that hard times are on the way.

On the other hand, if someone looks not at the big fish that are available now, but at the dearth of younger fish needed to provide the big fish in the future, it looks very much like the worst of times, with the last seven years providing, on average, the worst spawning success ever recorded.  Those folks see a dark future for the striped bass resource, worry that the stock might never be fully rebuilt again, and wisely believe the scientists who advise reducing bass landings.

The facts are enough to make anglers and angling-related businesses feel a frisson of fear.

Striped bass are one of the most important marine recreational fish species in the State of New York.  Last year, New York anglers took an estimated 11,518,735 saltwater fishing trips.  An estimated 2,311,531 of those trips—about 20%--primarily targeted striped bass.  That compares to 2,912,799 trips (25%) targeting summer flounder, 1,237,768 (11%) targeting scup, 842,814(7%) targeting bluefish, 730,762 (6%) targeting tautog, and 327,428 (3%) targeting black sea bass.

New York’s saltwater anglers may only land striped bass between 28 and 31 inches long, and right now, the average member of the 2018 year class is slightly over 31 inches in length, meaning that a little less than half of that year class remains available to recreational harvest.  Next year, most of the 2018s will have grown out of the slot, and the 2019 year class is far too small to fully replace them.  Some subsequent year classes are even smaller.

That means that, even assuming that the 2026 year class is of average or above-average size—something that, with what we know now about water temperatures and water flows in the Chesapeake Bay, is a very dubious assumption—we won’t have many fish enter the coastal slot limit until 2033.  If the 2026 year class is again well below average, it will be even longer until anglers will again have a reasonable chance of catching a bass that they might take home.

That’s bad news for much of the charter and party boat fleet, who claim that their customers won’t fish if they can’t take a fish home, and have been consistently opposing new management measures that would reduce recreational landings. 

Given the present state of most fish stocks, it’s not clear what their customers—and the rest of New York’s saltwater anglers—are going to fish for if the striped bass disappear.  Fluke ought to become more abundant over the next few years, and even if scup recruitment remains low, the population should remain fairly high for a while. 

But are fluke and scup, along with supporting appearances from tautog, bluefish, black sea bass and the like, be enough to make up the difference if the striped bass stock goes into further decline?

Once again, a South Shore party boat fleet’s website may hint at the answer.  Looking at the reports for the first four days of this week, one finds

“Wednesday, June 10, 2025

“Today’s (Wednesday) 1:01PM trip is cancelled due to lack of interest.  Today’s 7:01AM trip caught 56 Fluke and 6 Cape Shark.  Tonight’s (Wednesday) 6PM trip is cancelled due to lack of interest…  [emphasis added]”

“Tuesday, June 9, 2025

“Today’s 7:01AM trip caught 103 Fluke and 4 Cape Shark.  Today’s 1:01PM trip caught 23 Fluke and 5 Cape Shark.  Tonight’s (Tuesday) 6PM trip is cancelled due to lack of interest.  [emphasis added]”

“Monday, June 8, 2025

“Today’s (Monday) 1:01PM trip is cancelled due to lack of interest.  Today’s 7:01AM trip caught 68 Fluke and 5 Cape Shark.  Today’s 6PM trip caught 12 Bluefish and 1 Weakfish.  [emphasis added]”

“Sunday, June 7 2025

“Today’s (Sunday) 1PM trip is cancelled due to lack of interest.  Today’s 7:01AM trip caught 46 Fluke, 2 Sea Robins and 10 Cape Shark.  Today’s 7:02AM trip caught 321 Sea Bass, 243 Ling, 1 Pollock, 6 Cod, 5 Blackfish and 3 Mackerel.  Today’s 12Noon trip caught 10 Fluke, 2 Sea Robins and 6 Cape Shark.  Today’s 6PM trip caught 6 Bluefish.  [emphasis added]”

For one of the best-known and best-run party boat fleets on the South Shore to cancel five out of 15 trips—exactly one-third—during the heart of the spring inshore season, when the sun was generally out and the wind wasn’t blowing too hard, because there were too few anglers willing to fish to make sailing worthwhile, is a somewhat ominous sign.

It’s not hard to predict that if striped bass become less available to party boat anglers, a substantial majority of black sea bass remain too small to keep, and fishing for weakfish, bluefish, and tautog doesn’t improve, even more trips are going to be “cancelled due to a lack of interest,” and other businesses—the tackle shops, gas docks, and such—are also going to see business decline.

It’s still too early to tell whether this spring’s slow start was due more to cold water than to a decline in fish stocks, or whether fishing will rebound later in the year and draw more anglers out onto the boats.  Maybe all will be well.  Nonetheless, there’s a chill running up some folks’ spines when they think of the future, and that chill has nothing to do with the weather at all.