Back in 2006, the folks at The Fisherman headquarters in Shirley, NY asked me up to join the Long Island team at our home office. It was a tough decision, leaving my rented shanty on Cedar Bonnet Island for the Long Island Expressway, but it turned out to be a game-changer (married, kids, new life, etc.). And it didn’t take long to find a few special fishing haunts.
Having grown up on Long Beach Island in New Jersey, I figured Long Beach on the south shore of Long Island was a good place to start, and I eventually found myself plugging my way west down to Atlantic Beach, bucktailing fluke in Jamaica Bay with friend Austin Perilli, and getting out and about out east with New York edition Editor Fred Golofaro from time to time.
At one point I accepted an invitation from Capt. Tony Dilernia of Rocket Charters out of Manhattan to do a little striper fishing with the concrete jungle as a backdrop (quite a bit different from the scrub pines and marsh I was accustomed to in my own fishing background). Capt. Dilernia is New York’s representative to the Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Council, and while we may not see eye-to-eye on a lot of things related to New York and New Jersey fluke and sea bass, he and I have enjoyed a few apolitical “fun” trips for striped bass around New York City. Suffice to say, he’s got that urban striper fishery wired! Now having returned home to the Jersey Shore (with my New York born and raised wife in tow), I still look forward to striper fishing in NYC from time to time, the skyline over my shoulder and historic waterways chocked with freighters, ferries and barges; it’s definitely a unique experience. There is certainly some excellent stripering to be found there, especially when you fish with someone in the know!
Next Tuesday and Wednesday, May 21 and 22, a team from The Fisherman, Gray FishTag Research and Navionics will climb aboard Rocket Charters in search of big, spawning-class striped bass to catch, tag and release for science. Our two-day mission is to support the recreational fishing community at large while producing valuable data for marine science research. The plan is to deploy a pair of Pop-up Satellite Archival (PSAT) tags in a couple of spawning class fish, with the objective of improving the understanding about striped bass, where they travel and when. We’re hoping to hook into two good stripers, the biggest we can find, with the tags meant to collect hourly temperature, pressure, and light data.
When one of these tags pops off later this season, it will float to the surface and relay daily summaries of the stored data via satellites back to Gray FishTag Research. The folks from Navionics will also use the data to plot the final course of these striped bass for all to see; the cool part is that the research team is making it all “open access” to share with any and all parties at no cost.
The actual PSAT devices however do have a cost, a rather significant one. This season’s study is being sponsored by Navionics which has donated the cash to purchase the first two tags of what we hope to be an ongoing program in years to come. To participate in this study and donate to the cause, visit us at TheFisherman.com and look for the SCIENCE PARTNERS – NORTHEAST STRIPER STUDY story on our homepage. We’ve set up a Go Fund Me page to raise cash for future studies, with all the details are in that online feature.
Big Apple traffic on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then back on the Great Bay by Friday for the summer flounder opener with the gnats – life is good!
