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Fish On: Do you believe in miracles?

COURTESY PHOTO Mike McConnell with a beautiful striper caught last week off Plum Island.
COURTESY PHOTO
Mike McConnell with a beautiful striper caught last week off Plum Island.

After impatiently waiting for the local waters to cool and the bait fish to arrive followed by the sport fish, I was heartened by the first forays I made to try to cash in on the promised bonanza.

My fishing log entries for past years are full of photos and stories of great days on the water in late September and early October when we would head out in small boats and catch and release great numbers of large striped bass, bluefish and false albacore on almost every trip.

It didn’t much matter to the fish if we were using fly or spinning rods since they tried to swallow everything we threw at them. I’ve already chronicled the results of my first three or four recent trips chasing the “fall run.”

As I started writing this column on September 22, I was happy I’d done so because I was sure that the offshore passing of Hurricane Jose had all but killed the normal end-of-season fishing celebration.

We all should be happy that Irma went inland and didn’t hit Shelter Island head on as she did in islands off to the east of Florida and Florida itself.

The damage done by the largest hurricane ever recorded stemming from the Atlantic has made a wasteland of the Florida Keys and many villages and towns in that state. Truthfully, the Island came through it pretty much unscathed.

As I started writing this column, I felt the main casualty of Jose’s visit would be that the winds associated with it had absolutely slammed the door shut for sport fishing starting around September 16. It was hard to believe the winds had been blowing between 15 to 20 mph from the northeast for over 10 days with higher gusts interspersed.

Waves from that kind of wind makes it impossible for 20 to 25 foot fishing skiffs to leave their moorings and go out on the bays, much less the ocean. My boat, like most others including the commercial boats moored on the Island, are quietly bobbing about on their moorings, probably wondering, when will it all end?

I was convinced that even when the winds died off, the bays would take several days to calm and to let the sediment fall out of the muddy looking water and ultimately back to the sea bottom, clearing the water of silt. I believed the Montauk area would take an equal period of time to clean up, if not longer, because the swells out there,last week were averaging 9 feet and cresting, which adds a few more feet to their height.

This spells disaster for the fleet of fishing guides who make a good portion of their income from doing half- and full-day trips when the game fish are around.

My hope was that the fishing would come back strong after the waters healed and the season would be prolonged and extend into mid-November, which it’s done once or twice in the recent past. I knew however, if that turned out to be the way it happened, I could only cheer the action from my skiff in Florida as we head there in mid-October.

So what happened overnight September 22 was nothing short of a fisherman’s miracle. I woke the next day and looked out the window to see if the waves were still breaking over my dock, but saw nothing but ripples on Coecles Harbor.

I guessed that the wind had shifted more to the east and since we face southwest, we were more in the lee then when I went to bed. But I realized the wind had not just died, but the bay was dead calm. Because of prior commitments, all I could do was move my boat from where I’d stashed it for the storm and got it ready for fishing on the following day.

Mike McConnell was ready to go on his dock when I picked him up on Sunday morning and we shot over to Plum Gut about an hour into the incoming tide. Surprisingly, the water was not muddy or fouled with floating junk or weeds, but was as clear as it has been on the clearest day all year. We could look down into 10 feet of water and see the bottom clearly, especially when we were over sand.

We went to our usual spots along the rocky area under the light on Plum and caught our first striper, a feisty 24-inch fish. From then on we caught bass after bass that hit our popping plugs all along the east side of Plum Island.

It was exciting fishing since we often had groups of five to six fish swarming the lures and taking turns trying to eat it until one of them hooked up. In addition to 15 or so smaller fish, we landed and released four bass of between 31 to 33 inches that weighed from 11 to 12.5 pounds and lost four more that were larger. (Note: It is a scientific fact that every fish lost was larger than the largest landed.)