Blue Crab Special at Sagg Main Beach

It was a very unusual "blue crab special" early Sunday morning June 27th at the Sagg Main Beach near Bridgehampton, NY as I arrived with fishing rod in hand with clam bellies looking for some striped bass action. At some point overnight on the high tide the ocean had deposited dozens of small (3-5") blue crabs all over the beach. I could only imagine what the bass were doing just off shore with the rest of this mass group of crabs, as blue crabs are a favorite food of striped bass when they can find them.

With all that bait in the water the bass showed no interest in my clam bellies, so I turned to collecting 40+ crabs and returned them to Sagg Pond with the help of my black lab Decoy. Maybe I will have better luck next weekend!

Stripers on the bite in June.

Fishing off of Montauk on Friday, June 18^th in very calm seas, we hooked up with some beautiful stripe bass. Fun to catch and very tasty too! Nothing puts a larger smile on a kids face than reeling in one of these beautiful fish.

We also saw one of the first striped bass of the season taken early this morning off Sagg Main beach right after first light. Lots of clam shells on the beach, so there was obviously a clam bed right off shore. Clam bellies proved to be the right bait this morning for the feeding bass.

Unexpected Catch Off Montauk

We had quite a surprise about a week ago fishing one day off Montauk point. We has set out to catch large striped bass and blue fish which frequent the waters south of the lighthouse. However, after several hours of trying all sorts of live bait including eels and live porgies with no success we switched over to fluke rigs with squid.

Much to our surprise, we pulled up a Black Sea Bass pictured here, which is a member of the Grouper family. These fish are found off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, in the Chesapeake Bay and off New York. However, in 15+ years of fishing the waters off both the north and south fork, we have rarely come across them due to recreational and commercial fishing pressures. This catch was a real delight for this young angler!

Bass on the South Fork of Long Island

After too much time spent with work and school this spring, we finally got back to some serious fishing, this time on the South Fork of Long Island. The bass are now in post-spawn mode, and we landed this fish in a small pond near a golf course late one afternoon.

We got him by "sight fishing" where the bait (a plastic worm) was pitched just past where he was swimming and then jerked by him. He made a very aggressive lurch towards the bait and was hooked up!

Lots of fun catching this fish on ultra-light spin tackle with braided line, the perfect combo for both casting distance and accuracy.