TROUBLING THOUGHTS, OF A TROUBLED FUTURE

Mike Mucha and I have been fishing together for a very long time.

I first met him back in the ‘70s, at a tackle shop where I worked during the summers of my college and law school days that served as a hangout for a lot of the town’s striped bass anglers.  We started making some bass trips together, tossing bucktails into the tide that flowed past the sod banks and mansions that lined our local shore.

We had good times back then, starting the season with winter flounder during the first, blustery days of spring, and usually ending it with flounder, too, in November, although blackfish—what most folks call “tautog”—and maybe a late striper or two were also a part of the mix.  In between, there were striped bass and bluefish, weakfish and fluke, and sometimes a trip to Rhode Island to chase big fish offshore.

I was on his boat one morning in ’81, when we caught what remain my two largest bluefish, 19-10 ½ and 20-10 ½, on a glass-calm morning off Greenwich Point.  And it was on his boat that my father, Mike and I enjoyed an exceptional hour and a half catching weakfish, landing 13, weighing between 7 and 14 pounds, off Eaton’s Neck.  Mike took the 14-pounder on 4-pound; we learned, too late, that it would have been a line-class world record at the time, if it hadn’t ended up just being fillets instead.

When my father was in his late 80s, and couldn’t come out to fish with me on Long Island any more, Mike took him fluke fishing in the Sound, something he enjoyed up until the year that he died.

Since I moved to Long Island, we’ve developed a kind of shuttle-fishing system.  

He comes out and stays at my place, where we run offshore to fish for sharks, tuna and such, and I make the 0-Dark-30 runs up to his dock, where we head out onto home waters I’ve fished since I was two years old.  Over the years, we’ve won our share of tournaments, with Mike or his brother Gerry on the rod, while I mapped out our strategy, ran the boat and sank the gaff home at the end of the fight.  

Though we’ve long since grown out of our tournament phase, we’ll never forget the bigeye and yellowfin, bluefin and albacore, mako and marlin, and all of the other fish, that we caught both in competition and when we were out just fishing for fun.

It’s not hard to understand that fishing, particularly salt water fishing, has always been a big part of both of our lives.

So it was a bit of a shock when, I while ago, we were on his boat talking, and he said “If I was young right now, just starting out, I don’t think that I’d buy a boat.  It just isn’t worth it.  There aren’t any fish any more.”  

He’s repeated similar sentiments a few times since, most recently a month ago, when we were anchored up on some rocks off the Greenwich shore, hoping to put a few blackfish in the box.

It was one of those days that started well before sunrise, bucktailing stripers, and ended up in the afternoon, dropping green crabs down to the bottom where blackfish ought to have been.  

Throughout all those hours, there was some action and much disappointment.  All day, the sky above Long Island Sound had been dotted with small flocks of gulls hovering above schools of feeding striped bass, and the water’s rippled surface regularly exploded into bursts of white foam as schools of migrating fish chased bait into the air.  But the fish were all tiny, mostly three-year-olds from the big 2015 year class; even our pre-dawn efforts failed to move a single fish over five pounds. 

The hordes of small bass might bode well for the future.  If they can survive their sojourns in Chesapeake Bay, where 19-inch bass are still legal to kill, and if they manage not to end up in somebody’s cooler as a “bonus fish” during the fall run off New Jersey, where a special permit allows anglers to kill one little striped bass that is nearly, but not quite, large enough to spawn for the first time, those 2015s could help to rebuild the spawning stock.

If.

For the lack of larger fish was disturbing.  The tide, time of day and season was right, but larger fish just were not there.  Where were the 2011s, fish from an even larger year class than that in 2015.  They had been billed as the fishery's future, but anglers up and down the coast have not been finding them as abundant as had been expected.

Blackfish was much the same story.  We eventually found a little fast action, after spots that once were productive had provided no action at all, but almost all of the fish were very small, with only one above the 16-inch minimum.  Back in the ‘70s, we could have done better fishing from shore at the town beach.

And that was Mike’s point.  

He’s a hard-core angler, experienced, with a lot of free time, but for much of this summer, he hardly fished at all.  There were no striped bass.  Even bluefish were scarce, and fluke fishing was pretty slow.  And soaking clams for porgies and a few black sea bass just didn't hold much appeal.  Looking back on the past season, he just doesn't believe that such poor fishing could justify the expense of buying and maintaining a boat, if a person hadn't owned one before.

I understand how he feels.

My wife and I moved to Long Island in ’83, during the nadir of the striped bass collapse.  I had started fishing offshore to fill the void, and Long Island, with fluke, flounder and weakfish in the bays, and tuna and makos just a short run offshore, seemed like a natural place to be.  And for a short time, it was. 

But now, the winter flounder are gone, the fluke have been headed downhill and weakfish are far from abundant.  Bass are around for a few weeks in late spring, and another few weeks in the fall, but those windows of abundance are getting smaller every year, and lately we don't even have bluefish to fill up the gap.  

For a while, black sea bass out on the wrecks kept me active, but those fish, while still abundant, are shrinking, too.  Where I once found plenty of quality “knotheads” in the three to four pound range, I’m now working hard for fish half that size; numbers remain high, but few survive to grow large.

Offshore, we see the same thing.  Makos are shrinking and getting scarce; the last stock assessment was dismal.  Out in the canyons, the action is only a shadow of what it was when I first fished those waters back in the ‘80s.  The bigeye tuna population has fallen to 20% of historical numbers, and it’s showing up in the catch.  Yellowfin are much smaller and scarcer.  Even albacore, which used to almost become pests when they hit the lures four or five at a time and disrupted the hunt for larger tuna, have all but disappeared.

I can’t recall the last time that I saw white marlin inshore.

My entire season could largely be summed up as a few months of threshers and brown sharks, late-summer dolphin and false albacore; I hardly bothered fishing the bay.  While I enjoyed myself, I enjoyed myself far more in past years, when an abundance of inshore and offshore fish provided readily-accessible action that began before St. Patrick’s Day and continued ‘til after Thanksgiving.

Faced with that sort of reality, Mike’s comment rings true.

Fishing isn’t much fun when there’s few fish around, so why would anyone spend tens of thousands of dollars on a boat and motor, and commit themselves to years of bills for insurance, dockage, repairs and fuel, just to head out onto an increasingly empty ocean? 

Those of us born to the sport can’t walk away, and we’ve learned enough over the years to find a few fish even when only a few are around.  But green anglers, new to the sport, are more likely to just find frustration, and walk away.