Enough is enough! If you go back to about mid-September, you will realize that just about every single weekend between about now and then has been plagued by terrible wind. Literally every single one. While some wind is good for stirring up the fish or ‘shuffling the deck’ when it comes to bait movements and bringing fish down from the north, consistent wind all the time is not good as a whole, and let’s face it, most people these days have extremely busy lives and only have time to fish on the weekends, when most of this wind has been popping up. I write the reports for the East End and Surf column of the magazine on a weekly basis, and it’s like Ying and Yang. All the East End headboats and marinas are getting slammed because of these weekend conditions. The sucky part is during the week when not as many people are able to get out, conditions have been ideal, and reports have been great, especially on the bottom grounds around the point. But once that weekend comes around, the fans decide to kick on, and it shuts down most efforts of anyone even getting out.
Even for the tog opener on the South Shore, it was ridiculous. Winds were blowing 30 from the north all day long. I tried to fish Moriches in the morning, and while the fish bit, it was terrible for anchoring up and hindered my productivity. I made my reports calls that afternoon, and the East End marinas all told the same story of a blowout for the opener. Some boats ran to Fishers in that north, and I could only imagine how brutal it was running into that, but for the most part, most of the fleet stayed tied to the dock.
The surf fishing, on the other hand, has stayed strong despite the blow, and it might have even helped it in a bunch of different situations. The North Shore has had a tough time going with a lot of north and east winds, but the South Shore saw some extremely consistent fishing anywhere from the Montauk sand all the way down to Breezy Point.
A couple of weekends ago, I tried to fish the bay near Fire Island Inlet and the inlet itself, and a lone headboat was the only one that made it out into the ocean (they caught well). A couple of other larger center consoles tried to run out but came back pretty quickly due to the ocean swell. The afternoon kicked up out of the northwest and made fishing the south side of the bay a pain, so we ran back towards the mainland and plugged that shoreline for a bit.
We still have some season left in the pipeline. It’s definitely prime time for bigger tog, especially on the East End. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the weekend winds comply for the rest of the season and through December. We had a pretty rough first half of the fall. Hopefully, the second half is much kinder to us weather-wise.
