The Weekly Salvage
(6.29.23) Fishy News from Around the Northeast and Beyond
The maritime law of salvage has its origins in Roman law, which dictated that one who preserved or improved upon the misplaced property of another was owed compensation, even if the service was not requested. Let’s get out the inter-webs seiner and get to work.
Podcasts of the Week: On The Water Podcast - Panama Kayak Fishing & Fly-In Pike —> Kevin and Jimmy talk about some of their recent fishing trips outside the Northeast, including the Latin American topwater tuna capital (perhaps soon to be named the Cape Cod of the South), Panama! They chat about the challenges of gear prep and gathering intel when traveling abroad, and give tips on getting there safely and finding fish on the ‘yak.
SeaBros Fishing Podcast - Captain Rob Taylor on “Beard Hair Flies” —> The Sears Bros interview one of the fishiest dudes in the Northeast, the topics varying from live chumming bass with bunker using side-scan, the least optimal poop-bite scenarios, to bump-trolling bluefish in CC bay. A great combination of tactics and comedic relief.
Reports: OnTheWater / Fisherman Mag / SaltyCape / HullTruth / StripersOnline
Recipe of the Week: Tuna Poké Waffles —> Peanut Butter & Jelly. Macaroni and Cheese. And now, Tuna and Waffles. It’s quicker than rolling Sushi, just as delicious, and delivers even more poké per bite in a savory fried rice mouth vehicle. Here’s the ingredient list & directions.
Local Knowledge: After seven months of anticipation and our weekly (salvage) communion with the Northeast’s sharpest Tuna minds, it was wishful thinking that I’d be able to log any shuteye before the first weekend offshore. Turns out, the 3:30am alarm never had a chance to go off, my second cup of Dunkins’ finest already half-drank, my mind racing and split-rings pliers occupied with an eleventh-hour plug swap. Scanning a fog-shrouded mooring field in the direction of the imperceptible North Cut, confidence collided with stitches of apprehension.
Fast-forward 90-minutes, and I’m setting a casual ‘search spread’ some 35-miles offshore with none other than a mustachio’d Jimmy Fee, my father at the helm, furiously fogging and defogging his salt-crusted bifocals. Visibility was proving Nova Scotian at best, or at least on par with Dagobah, Yoda’s notoriously soupy home-planet. With reports of good AM slack-tide feeds filtering through the brocial network in recent days, we thought we’d have a decent shot of finding a few ghosts running the fog banks at sunrise. Turns out, they found us, and certainly had the element of surprise in their favor.
As soon as the third bar went back behind the wash, two dozen 50” fish erupted 40yds off the bow, then another pod to our eight-o-clock. Half-way through a stick-bait back-cast, I hear the port side-tracker go off, then the drag on the starboard 50W slips and crackles as a fish peels off into the distance. Rushing back to switch into neutral gear, I watch the bar floating 40ft off the stern, almost motionless in the prop-wash, get grenaded by a third Bluefin. Wtfff?! After pulling the hook of the first taker, we seal the deal on a comedically-tangled double-header, thankful for the sporty but shmedium-sized specimens. We resumed the search, and after wrapping up and releasing a few more singles over the course of the next hour and a half, the action was over almost as suddenly as it began. The first seasonal taste of happy pelagic violence was incredible, cathartic almost, but the topwater potential would make for another sleepless night…
It's zero-dark-thirty again, and ‘Sunday Service’ was about to commence for some Jersey invasives. Jack and Billy, fresh off a 5.5hr pilgrimage up I-95, join me and Greg on the dock. “No trolling today” were the first words out of Jack’s mouth (after not seeing him in 9-months). I couldn’t help but respect the frankness, so I fist-bumped and nodded in approval. The thought of trolling probably hadn’t even crossed Billy’s mind. Not an option. 50Ws unloaded, we shove off in the dark, pressed play on the ‘Pelagic Pregame’ playlist, and pushed 30-knots into gray-light. Some 50-minutes later, coming off plane in a tunnel of mist, the intro of a French trance anthem just beginning to build, we hear it. The Crashing.
The crashing of a waterfall, of Bluefin. For a full six-seconds, no one even shouted, dumbstruck with child-like wonder. Hundreds of tuna were going airborne, leap-frogging one another in hot pursuit of Fenway frank-sized sandeels spraying in twilight froth. CAST!!! And the spell was broken. Jack’s first offering with a Siren Sorry Charlie connects, and he’s bent to the foregrip, his ‘Gosa screaming and the fellas…we’re also screaming. Subdued to a soundtrack worth every one of its 132BPM (roughly half my heart-rate), the first fish comes over the rail and uninterrupted, the feed continues.
One eye on the radar, another at the sickle-fins slicing and dicing off the stern corner, I flick my stick-bait ahead of a boil and twitch-pause-BANG I’m loaded, my tuna bolting from the school, 120lb shock leader rattling against finlets on the way out of the fray. After a 10-min duet of Avicii and a Stella 18k whining at 32lbs of drag pressure, I’ve got my 52” fish boat-side and sent back into the melee, a future giant in the making (or Orca food). Billy is already horsing another fish on the bow when I complete my leader check, his epoxy jig nonchalantly T-boned the second it crested the whitewater at the leading edge of the pelagic flying-V.
Greg, a blood-soaked gaff in one hand, bent-over popping rod in the other, is smiling ear-to-ear and laughing for no reason in particular. There’s 75-100lbers still launching themselves left and right, and the boat has drifted less than than a quarter mile down the 180ft contour line. Another double, a few chafe-offs and handful of singles later, the intensity of the feeds wane, whitewater and foam folding back into the blue-gray…our perception of time and tide with it. It felt like a day’s worth of emotion, but upon further review, it was 7:05am.
Know Your Forage: Northern Sand Lance (Ammodytes dubius) - AKA “Sandeels”
Often referred to as an eel, sand lance are actually a zooplanktivorous fish (meaning that it eats tiny marine animals at the base of the food chain).
Sand lance depend on the presence of sandy substrate on the seafloor in relatively shallow water depths (less than 300 ft).
Sand lance spend their days feeding on zooplankton in the upper reaches of the water column and bury themselves in the sand at night.
Sand lance form dense schools that fluctuate widely in abundance and distribution over seasonal, annual, and decadal cycles.
Color varies but lance are typically an olive-brown or blue-green on the back, tapering to a silver or dull white on its sides.
Sand Lance support 72 regional predators including 45 fish species, two squids, 16 seabirds, and nine marine mammal…making them a ‘keystone species’ of the Northwest Atlantic Shelf.
Old But Relevant: Everything Eats Sand Eels (SaltwaterSportsman) & Mid-Atlantic Tuna on Eels (SportFishingMag) - “Shimmering like sparkling diamonds in the sunlight, schools of undulating sand eels quickly get the attention of hungry game fish along the northeastern coast. They’re covert burrowers that root down in the sand and pebble beaches. You hardly ever see them, but when sand eels abandon their hideouts, they ignite a red-hot bite. Suddenly, an array of species from fluke to giant bluefin tuna tracks their movements with the sole purpose of chowing down.”
Light Tackle Yellowfin (OTW’s Jimmy Fee) - “The yellowfin tuna begin making their appearance at New Jersey’s midshore tuna grounds around the fourth of July, Radlof says, but their arrival has much more to do with when and where an eddy of warm water pushes off the Gulf Stream. Water temperatures of 75 degrees or more are necessary to bring the tuna in, but as long as the bait remains, the fish will linger in temperatures down to the mid-60-degree range. These fish are structure oriented, looking for bait over the lumps from 40 to 60 miles out, but yellowfin also orient to “living structure.” Anglers regularly find yellowfin hanging below schools of rays, pods of dolphins, or shoals of skipjack tuna. In most of the recent seasons, tuna inside the canyons, both yellowfin and bluefin, were keyed in on sand eels, but in 2021, sand eels were scarce, though squid were abundant.”
Good News: Chesapeake Bay “Dead Zone” Predicted to Be Smallest on Record (FishWire) - During spring and summer, nutrient pollution spurs the growth of algae blooms, which remove oxygen from the water when they die. These low-oxygen sections of the bay, known as hypoxic areas, can suffocate marine life and shrink habitat available to fish, crabs and other creatures. But in 2023, the dead zone is predicted to be 33% smaller than the long-term average taken between 1985 and 2022. The significantly-smaller-than-average forecast size is due largely to a lack of rainfall in spring 2023. As a result, the amount of nitrogen pollution flowing into the bay from its watershed was 42% lower than the long-term average during January through May 2023.” —> A much needed relief for the East Coast’s young-of-the-year Striper factory, as well as the home of one of the the Atlantic’s most essential ‘keystone’ species, the Menhaden. Juvenile Atlantic Menhaden, if you can believe it, are just getting back on their feet after two decades of severe over-fishing. As you can see in the graph above, we’re nowhere near the golden-age of the proliferate ‘70s pogy.
Lobster Lady’s Secret to Longevity (Messager) - Maine's "Lobster Lady," who at 103 recently renewed her fishing license for her 95th trapping season in Rockland, credits her longevity to time on the boat, and cooking weekly meals of New England-style baked beans, biscuits, and pies. Virginia Oliver's family continues to rely on selling lobster for their livelihood in Maine. The largest lobster-producing state in the country, more than 5,600 pine-state lobstermen catch 100 million pounds of lobster each year, according to the MLMC. Oliver says that even at 103, she has no plans to slow down. "You have to keep moving," she told reporters. "I intend to do this until I die." —> What a G.I.L.F… Grandma I’d Like (to) Fish (with). Reminds me of that late-90s alt-rock classic…
Bait-Monkey: Sandeel Slayers on Spin
Thanks for reading The Weekly Salvage, until next week!
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