5/21/12

That Old Mother-Nature has us in a nice weather pattern, with marginal weather during
the week, but great weekends and it looks like this week is going to be the same.

The striped bass fishing just keeps on keeping on, with plenty of stripers being caught,
most in the ten to fifteen pound range but occasional fish into the twenties. They being
caught trolling on the parachutes and diamond jigging. I don’t believe many anglers are
using eels because there are just too many bluefish around. The flood tide has been
especially good with fish on the top at the Elbow.

Fluke fishing is marginally better with more shorts than there have been, but keepers still
in short supply. The new regs haven’t done much since now many of the fish are around
eighteen to nineteen inches. I could never figure out how the fish know what size they
should stop growing at. I spoke to one of the charterboat guys who made a commercial
trip for fluke the other day and he was only able to catch eighty pounds, and his size limit
is a lot less than the recreational limit. Some good news for bottom fisherman is that
some nice sized seabass are showing up on the fluke grounds. Their season isn’t open yet.

Porgies are thick as fleas over at Cherry Harbor. A couple of charterboats have been
going over there fishing commercially, catching a hundred pounds or so per hour. It’s
easy fishing in ten to twenty feet of water with no tide to speak of. The bad part is that
they are only worth seventy-five cents or so. If I remember correctly, that’s close to what
we used to get back in the seventies when I use to do that.

You might get the idea that things are slow for the charterboats based on these guys going
pinhooking and you’d be right. Saturday there were less than a dozen of them out.

Of course the fishing in Central America will still be hot through the spring and some of
the lodges that were booked up through the winter months are starting to have some
availability. Give it a thought and check it out at www.tropicalfishing.com

If you would like to get these weekly reports sent to you by e-mail, drop me a line at
reports@montauksportfishing.com and if you need any other information about fishing
in Montauk check out www.montauksportfishing.com

Capt Gene Kelly