Scales and Tales

With the water a bit roiled and off-color in some ports today, a little added color on your teasers and bucktails should help excite the fluke. I usually prefer white for my teasers and bucktails, but late summer often sees hot pink hit a productive streak, especially if there is a strong hatch of calico crabs in the area. Hot pink is also highly visible in waters where brown tide is well established. As for chartreuse, it's always worth a try when the water is murky. To increase your chances of the fluke spotting your offering, make the teaser chartreuse and your bucktail pink. This combo works especially well in the shallow south shore bays, and in less than 20 feet of water on Long Island Sound. Give it a try if the waters are still cloudy tomorrow or later this week.

Check back later for more reports.

As you can see from today’s Newsday cover story, the brown tide is still blooming on Great South Bay. While nobody enjoys fishing in discolored water, sometimes there isn't much choice. Experts note that the brown tide does not seem to harm fin-fish, so you might still catch a few if you try hard enough. Here are a couple of tips to help the cause.

● Fish near inlets. The brown tide is generally less intense where ocean water enters a bay or harbor.
● Fish on rising tides. Again, clean water from the ocean floods into the bay, diluting the tide at least a little bit.
● Use bright- or black-colored lures. Chartreuse, florescent orange, hot pink and pure black are more visible in murky water than white, silver, tan, olive, green or “natural” minnow colors.
● Use big lures to provide a larger, more easily seen, target.
● Choose lures that make a rattling sound when retrieved. If using soft plastics, insert a small, inexpensive, fishing rattle, available from bait and tackle shops or on-line catalogs, into the body of the lure. The clanking sounds emitted as you retrieve will help predator species zero in on the target.
● Fish with real bait. Fresh whole clams and bunker chunks work well for stripers and blues. Live killies or strips of squid attract fluke. School weaks and kingfish will strike sandworms, strips of squid or pieces of clam. A chum pot full of ground clam or bunker can work wonders with porgies, weakfish and even fluke when you fish at anchor.

If you've taken a look at our Newsday cover story about the brown tide on Great South Bay, you might also want check out my recent video clip: Fishing Through The Brown Tide. From www.newsday.com, go to Explore LI and then click on "Outdoors." You'll see the clip toward the bottom of the screen. Hope it helps.

Speaking with Captain Brennan reminded me of another point porgy anglers should note: Be extra quiet when setting up in shallow water. If the scup, as porgies are also called, are in less than 20-foot depths, you’ll need to quietly double anchor well uptide and then drop back slowly until over the fish. Look for porgies to hold over submerged rock piles and mussel-covered humps on the bottom.

More to come. Check back.

Dave Brennan, Captain of the Greenport open boat, Peconic Star (www.peconicstar.com,) is one of Long Island’s top porgy skippers. He offers this tip as an important first step in becoming a porgy expert: “Hook ‘em before they bite.”

It’s no joke. If you wait for a porgy to try and rip the bait from your hook, you’ll likely miss the hit. That’s because scup, as porgies are also known, usually taste a bait before they strike in earnest.

“Porgies swim up to the bait, gently taste it and spit it out once or twice, before trying to tear it off the hook,” explains Brennan. “As soon as your line hits bottom, lift the sinker up two or three inches and feel for extra weight at the end of the line. If the line feels a bit heavy, start cranking – that’s a fish mouthing your bait."

There is no need to strike hard, added Brennan. Swing your rod and you’ll pull the hook right out of the fish’s mouth. Most porgy sharpies simply give a smooth and stead lift to set the hook.

The Peconic Star is currently fishing for fluke, but will make the switch to porgies on Wednesday.

More to come. Check back later today.

I remember seeing my first hatch of the 17-year cicadas back in 1973. Just entering my ‘teens at the time, I was already a die-hard largemouth bass fan, and enjoyed catching pickerel, bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish as well. It was sometime during that June when I read a piece in a fishing magazine about “matching the hatch,” for trout. The basic theory held that trout favored whichever hatching fly or terrestrial insect was in the greatest supply at the moment, and matching your flies to that particular insect would virtually guarantee fishing success.

Well, it didn’t take long before I was casting grasshoppers, butterflies, moths, caterpillars and just about any creepy, crawly bug I could find to the captive audience of fish in Sayville Mill Pond, Bayport’s Lotus Lake, and even Cow Pond, a small puddle toward the south end of Sayville’s Broadway Park that once held a few panfish, bass, bullfrogs and leopard frogs. Cow Pond has dwindled to a tiny puddle over the years, and biologists fear that leopard frogs may by now be extinct on Long Island, but the lessons learned fishing that summer have held with me to this very day.

So it was that I found myself thinking back to those glory days while examining cicadas from the woods of Ridge late last week. As I pondered how to match their size and shape, I recalled using them for bait that long ago summer. When the hatch ran its course and my supply of free bait came to an end, I struggled to keep the action alive by tossing various surface poppers. Eventually, I settled on casting a small, black Jitterbug. I would toss it out near weed beds, twitch it gently once or twice, and then reel it back with a slow and steady retrieve. The bass smacked that little lure right through the end of the summer – and I was forever hooked on topwater action.

I’m happy to report Jitterbugs are still included in my freshwater arsenal, and they still work great, especially for tempting largemouth bass after dark. Over the past two weeks, however, I’ve been throwing a one-quarter-ounce size during the day on several ponds and the surface strikes have been furious, especially in the late afternoon when cicadas are most prone to take to the air. My guess is that the cicadas have become the hatch to match on some freshwaters in mid- and eastern Suffolk County. If you have a black Jitterbug rattling around inside your tackle box, break it out for a few casts. You may find the response tremendously explosive.

The new 20-1/2” minimum size limit has undoubtedly made it more difficult to bring home a few keeper fluke this year. Still, the season is off to a decent start with a fair number of legal fish reported. By now, most fluke fans know the basics for catching keepers: fish in 30- to 50 feet of water; use large baits like Peruvian spearing or six- to eight-inch strips of fillet cut from sea robin and bluefish; and choose a fishing outfit strong enough to work heavy sinkers. Following are few more tips worthy of consideration:

● Fish hard at the start or end of the tide, and during periods of slack water. Smaller fluke are generally aggressive right through the tide but larger doormats feed most intently as the current softens.

● Shorten your drifts to concentrate over the most productive water. Many boaters like long, easy drifts that allow for coverage of a lot of water. Big fluke, however, are often bunched tightly in small areas. Mark any spot that produces a keeper and return quickly to probe it again and again. My drifts often measure 100 yards or less. Sometimes, they measure less than 30 yards.

● When fishing inside a bay, harbor or inlet, try several drifts outside the main current. Look for eddy water, drop-offs and pools where a slowing current and greater depth allow baitfish to dive for the bottom. Big fluke often lie in wait at such ambush points. Try fishing down-current from a large bridge abutment, bulkhead or rocky point.

● Anchor near structure to tempt doormats. Those same rough spots that give up sea bass in summer and blackfish in the fall hold big fluke. Instead of drifting across structure, try anchoring slightly uptide and then slowly working a bait down-current to probe productive edges. Sometimes it helps to get your bait close to the structure and simply let it sit still for ten or fifteen minutes. Sea bass and blackfish are often found in the densest part of a wreck, rock pile or reef but large fluke prefer to settle five to ten yards from the structure’s edge.