Summer is in full swing. Water temperatures are up at The Race, Valiant, Plum Gut, Great Gull, Little Gull, Watch Hill, and even the open ocean water behind Fishers Island. On all the reefs fishing is as it should be, for this time of year, with the exception of the bluefish. Where are the bluefish this year? By this time we should have trouble catching stripers because of all the bluefish eating our baits, but yesterday we only caught one and even it was in with a big school of stripers. I’ve only fished one day this year when the bluefish seemed to be in full summer swing and even that bunch of fish were gone the next day.
Anyway, yesterday we fished hard all day on both tides and only caught one bluefish. Luckily the striper numbers are up this year, and so even though we had to work hard to get them, we did well on the stripers today. My angler today fished with light tackle spinning gear. My spinning gear is generally spooled with 15 lb. braid and I tip it with a 3-4′ fluorocarbon leader in either 15 lb. or 20 lb. (depending on the fish and conditions). All of our fish were caught on either a small holographic diamond jig fished on the surface or on 1 oz. jig heads loaded with soft plastic baits. Once we had our fill of sport-fish my angler was wanting to catch some fish for his family’s upcoming BBQ picnic. We were able to load him up on big and hard fighting scup (porgies) in short order. Some of the porgies were in the 15-18″ range. So even though all the stripers he caught were released to fight another day, he went home with a bucket full of big porgies as evidence of a great day on the water.
