Hooking a big fish surprisingly close to shore.

Conventional wisdom says that in order to hook-up with really big fish off the south shore of Long Island you need to go out to the “canyons” or the edge of the continental shelf, which is 90-100 miles offshore.

Rich and Geoffrey discuss tactics.

But we discovered to our delight that there are big fish within 20 miles of the south fork of eastern Long Island, including Bluefin tuna and really big sharks.

We set out for a trip with our local shark-fishing expert Rich Iaccarino from Center Moriches running on "Two Docs" out of Hampton Bays. The trip started with trolling for bait outside the Shinnecock inlet, and we hooked up with a “slammer blue” shortly after dropping an umbrella rig 15 minutes into the trip. We added some bunker into the live-well, and headed out to sea.

Preparing the bait.

The first step was to set up the chum slick – a 5 gallon bucket with bluefish and bunker parts design to attract sharks using their amazingly keen sense of smell in the water. 

The line set-up consisted of three shark rigs, spaced about 30 yards apart and supported by red, white and blue balloons in honor of the fourth of July weekend. Rich told us we would most likely find blue sharks, short-fin mako sharks or thresher sharks.

After drifting in a nearly non-existent wind, we saw one of the balloons start to move. It wasn’t a hard strike like a tuna, but a much slower hook-up.

Rob tries his hand with the fish on.

We weren’t sure what we had on the line for quite a while, until the fish “showed color” near the surface, but it felt like we had a truck on the other end of the line as we began the fight. This was the start of a nearly two and half-hour battle with what turned out to be a thresher shark.

Thresher sharks have one of the most dangerous tails in the ocean. It has evolved a deadly hunting tactic to kill its prey with its tail. Using whip-like motion know as “tail smacking” it can stun or kill its prey, including bluefish and smaller tuna.

As the fish got closer to the boat, “the dance” started: forward, back, circle right, circle left in order to keep the fish behind and to the side of the boat, avoiding the props and a chance to cut the line. Fast and accurate driving from our skipper kept the fish behind the boat and out of harm’s way. 

A pleasant distraction during the fight was a school of Atltantic Bluefin tuna that shot up behind the boat chasing bait with great vigor, the closest to shore ever we had seen this species!

 

Persistence paid off as we boated the fish, which tipped the scale at 320 pounds at the Oakland’s Marina scale later that afternoon. An epic battle indeed, and a trip we’ll be discussing for the foreseeable future.