I made the decision to haul the sloop Leilani, to bring her onto “the hard,” as the sailor calls the land, two weeks ago when one of the prognosticating computer models showed Hurricane Joaquin passing directly over Long Island.

With the help of Peter Spacek, Leilani slipped her mooring at the south end of Lake Montauk. She drove to Uihlein’s Marina at the head of the harbor under power from her 20-horsepower “iron wind,” sails furled but desperate for just one last breath from the pre-hurricane blow buffeting the East End. Leilani was not the only boat heading for the barn trailing fears that the hurricane would turn east, posing no threat to Montauk, which it did.

Fears because boaters were enjoying an exceptionally beautiful early autumn, a fall that seemed to promise weeks to come before the hard and its mothballs. A sad time.

The relationship between man (and woman) to boats is as complex as it is hard to put into words. For me, Leilani is an escape from the hard, especially when her sails fill and she heels — bows in obeisance — to the sea for its many gifts. Legend has it that boats are named for women because boats depend on (are at the mercy of) the sea like a child does its mother.

I think it goes deeper than that, but surely there’s a rocking-the-cradle aspect of a boat at her mooring, as well as punishment delved out when a wrongdecision is made, like leaving a boat in the water in the face of an approaching storm. No, I was glad I hauled. Too much at stake.

And, as it turned out, our boaters’ loss was our surfcasters’ gain. I believe the top three fish on the Montauk SurfMasters fall tournament as of Tuesday were caught during the pre-hurricane storm that kept fishing boats at bay, their skippers weighing whether they should call it a season.

As discussed in last week’s “On the Water,” the surfcasting was wild, a classic dream come true, when a strong east wind drives prey shoreward — in this case, big bunker — with hungry striped bass hot on their trail.

As of Tuesday, the standings in the tournament’s wader division were as follows: Klever Oleas’s 42.56-pound striped bass stood in first place. Oleas’s 31.02-pound striper held second place, and a 23.86-pound bass landed by Mike Larson held third.

Mary Ellen Kane, a perennial winner in the women’s division, was at the top of the leader board with a 26.42-pounder. Nick Bocchino and his 35.2-pound striper dominate the wetsuit division.

Outside the tournament, very big bluefish were trashing bunker under the Montauk Lighthouse and west through the beaches of downtown Montauk, Napeague through Amagansett, Georgica Beach (big blues at Georgica on Monday) in East Hampton, and on and on. Bass and bluefish have been bending rods at Gin Beach on Montauk’s north coast. Although thebass action has slowed some, the continuing presence of bunker is a sign the striped bass season is not over.

Once storm swells began to subside, it became clear that Gardiner’s Bay’s cornucopia of porgies, sea bass, and false albacore was still producing.

“If it’s not blowing northwest, it’s blowing southwest. I can’t get out,” Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett said, referring to opportunities to go “coot” shooting, using the Bonac name for sea scoters. Bennett runs combination “cast and blast” charters for anglers who like to cast for fish while waiting for sea ducks to descend on his decoys. Lots of laughs, believe me.

“Yesterday, a dragger crossed the bay heading to Montauk,” Bennett said on Tuesday morning. “I guess. There was an illusion. It looked like a giant ship at first when it crossed in the lee of Gardiner’s Island” — calm water in the lee of anything reflects a kind of mirage into the air, making things passing through the mirror-calm area look larger — “and it shrank down to a 40-foot dragger. Ha, ha. Anyway, there must have been thousands of coot in the air. They say there’s been a lot all the way into Cedar Point and Sag Harbor.”

The hunting season started Saturday. The bag limit is 6 per day, 18 in possession.

As Roseanne Roseannadanna of “Saturday Night Live” might say if she were with us today, “What’s all this fuss about blue-green algae? Algae are good, aren’t they?” Yes, blue-green algae have become common in the news lately. But I doubt that one in 10,000 people have ever seen one or has any idea about what one is. In actuality, the blue-green alga is not an alga at all (true algae have nuclei), but a bacterium, in fact, a cyanobacterium, one of the first to exist on earth.

There are fossil things that are called stromatolites and oncolites that date back to the dawn of life. A few of these are so large that they form “reefs” visible to the naked eye from a half mile away, such as those in Shark Bay in southwest Australia or the Bahamas. The cells secrete a mucous material that traps sand grains and detritus around them, binding them together and creating a larger and larger resilient mass over thousands if not millions of years.

We should know about this group of bacteria because if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be here, nor would the million and more other species in the Kingdom Animalia. Perhaps, as long as more than 3 billion years ago, or at least 2.4 billion years ago, according to the fossil record, when the atmosphere contained almost no oxygen, they were here absorbing carbon dioxide and using their greenness to turn it into carbohydrates, while releasing oxygen as a gaseous waste product. Our first fossils were cyanobacteria.

We owe our existence to these little filamentous blue-green cells, yet we know so little about them. They occur all over the world, mostly in fresh waters, and are generally harmless. Perhaps that’s why we’ve studied them so little. Yet, we have almost all seen them in our local streams, ponds, pools, and puddles. Most of us know them as “pond scum,” the slimy malodorous stuff that occasionally takes on the appearance of a noxious film across the surface of the water.

Blue-green algae can be nutritious, like other greenstuffs, as well. At least one company, New Earth, farms them and markets them in the form of several different health food products. But all of a sudden they are gaining a very nasty reputation, not only here, but all over the United States and the rest of the world. One newly invasive species, Cylindrospermopsis racibarskii, is particularly troublesome.

On a place with the inviting name of Palm Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia, in 1979, this species not only fouled the water but poisoned more than 100 adults and children who drank it. Normally, it does not cause a problem, but the waterworks handlers there made the mistake of using copper sulfate to kill it, as it was clogging pipes and filters in a big way. Well, it turns out that the worst kind of control method to remove blooms of this algae is to kill it with chemicals, as it releases poisons in its death throes, poisons that are normally used to render it inedible to fish, zooplankton, and others that feed at the bottom of the food chain.

It’s only in the last two years that blue-green algae have caused a stir locally, especially in coastal water bodies like Agawam Lake in Southampton Village, Mill Pond in Water Mill, Georgica Pond in East Hampton, and, now, Fort Pond and Big Reed Pond in Montauk. When conditions are right, these organisms multiply by cell division, doubling several times a day; two produce four, four produce eight, and so on. The right conditions include an ample supply of nutrients, particularly nitrogenous and phosphorous ones, low oxygen, still water, and little rainfall.

The above-mentioned ponds receive runoff and groundwater underflow laden with all kinds of chemical stuff that produces a soup harmful to fish and other aquatic animals, but nutritious to blue-green algae. So if we don’t clean up our act — and as a species we are far from doing that — those little microbes that one can’t see individually with the naked eye but only in an ungodly, ugly slimy mass, those microbes that gave us life to begin with, might take it away. The invasive one I referred to came from the tropics, so as we become more and more tropical under the pall of global warming, watch out!

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

It was the light. The afternoon light and the unknown number of days the yearling humpback floated dead before the full moon and the surging remnants of Hurricane Joaquin cast it upon the rocks east of the trailer park in Montauk.

The whale was white, a silvery white, with one of its graceful pectoral fins languorously draped across its midsection like the arm of an otherworldly odalisque. Beautiful.

Joaquin had turned east, away from the coast, his course pictured on weather maps as a scimitar of potential trouble that instead of carving up the beach — and in the process proving once again that the sand bulwarking planned for downtown Montauk is a waste of time and money — also put the storm in the perfect location to provide surfers with the best swell of 2015.

The dead whale-good surf combination raised the specter of shark involvement. Around here “floaters” are well known to bring sharks of dangerous varieties shoreward. Capt. Frank Mundus, speaking about the whale-shark combination as it was realized in August of 1986:

“There was this whale. There was the beach. There was the wind. I says, ‘Teddy [his mate], that sucker’s gonna wind up somewheres on the beach if they don’t do something.’ The handwriting was on the wall. So we go in, and we heard the next day that he washed up on the beach down in Amagansett. So Teddy went down to look at him, and they didn’t drag him up the beach yet. When they did, the tiger sharks was hangin’ on him. Of all the dumb things. I mean, those people who ordered that whale dragged up and buried — there was never a kid what had a little sand bucket and small shovel and played in the sand that wouldn’t have known better. . . . My God, they’re gonna have maggots big enough to shoot with a shotgun. And that’s exactly what happened, and there’s nice houses right there. People pay a lot of money for waterfront property, put up a nice house, and then they get a whale buried in their backyard.”

Mundus went fishing off Amagansett the day after the whale washed ashore and caught two large tiger sharks. A reporter asked him, “Did you see any more?”

“We didn’t see any. We didn’t even see these two before they ate the bait,” he answered.

Last week, all the usual spots were firing including Ditch Plain, only a few hundred yards from where the whale came ashore. And as Joaquin turned northeast, with an accent on the east, rock reefs and sandbars that had not received such a perfect swell in over a year began to strut their stuff. And surfers were not the only beneficiaries of last week’s weather. Surfcasters were able to take advantage of the easterly blow from the storm that moved up the coast just prior to Joaquin.

On Saturday, Oct. 3, in the rain and near gale-force winds from the first storm, casters launched their heaviest bucktail lures into the maelstrom below the Montauk Lighthouse. What their casts lacked in distance because of the wind’s resistance was more than made up for by the corralling effect of the accompanying surge that drove prey species, including good-size bunker, landward.

And, in answer to the Montauk surfcasters’ most-repeated prayer, the big striped bass feeding on them that day were also swept closer to the rocks where the casters were perched, or, as in a few cases, swept from them like so many flies at a picnic. Big bass in the 30-to-40-pound range were landed.

One man’s feast is another man’s famine, of course. The weather that fulfilled the dreams of surfcasters dashed those hoping to tie into a feisty false albacore or two, or bass, or gorilla bluefish on light tackle or homemade fly from their small boats. The bottom fishing also seemed to be shaken up by the back-to-back storm surges. Montauk’s Viking Fleet of party boats is always a good place to check the bottom, especially during the fleet’s “jumbo fall porgies and sea bass” season. The Viking reported slower than usual action immediately after the storms passed, but there were signs the schools were getting reorganized this week.

Montauk charter boats also reported finding a fair amount of cod on recent trips. On Friday, Yu Lam of New York City won first place in the pool by catching a 31/2-pound porgy. That’s huge. Anton Picinic of New Jersey earned second place with a 141/2-pound cod.

We’ve just suffered through another northeaster, but fortunately missed Hurricane Joaquin, which went out to sea after bombarding the Bahamas and Bermuda. After a long lull between 1962 and 1983, we’ve had a plethora of costly coastal storms beginning with the March northeaster of 1984 and culminating with Sandy at the end of October 2012.

What God giveth, he can take away. He’s been doing that to Long Island ever since he and his glaciers created it more than 15,000 years ago. Barring a return glaciation in the next 15,000 years, Long Island will get smaller and smaller and eventually waste away to an elongate shoal, a tortuous bump in the water between the Long Island Sound and Atlantic Ocean.

Up until the 1950s, as calculated by annually measuring the distance between Montauk Point’s actual tip and the Lighthouse since its construction just after the turn of the 18th century, the South Fork was shortening at a rate of about a foot a year — some 200-plus feet gone by 1960.

Now the erosion rate in many places along our south and north shores is on the order of five or more feet per year. Long Island’s famous Atlantic Ocean barrier beach, stretching from Southampton Village to the Rockaways is similarly shrinking. If it weren’t for Georgina Reid’s tremendous volunteer efforts towards stabilizing the Lighthouse’s bluff followed by the Montauk Historical Society’s continued caretaking over the years lead by Greg Donahue, a “student” of Reid’s, the Lighthouse would be gone and the Point would have receded another 100 feet or so to the west.

Montauk’s north shore west of the inlet to Lake Montauk, once the largest freshwater pond on Long Island, but a tidal harbor after its permanent opening to Block Island Sound around 1926, is receding to the south at a rate of more than 3.75 feet per year since 1933, when the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey published a series of Long Island coastal survey maps. Areas downdrift of jetties constructed perpendicular to the run of the coast accelerate beach erosion and since the longshore current trends westerly from Montauk Point, that stretch of beach has been retreating at an accelerated rate ever since.

Once loosened by erosion, the very large glacial erratics that are partially responsible for Montauk’s rugged coastal aspect, roll down the coastal bluffs to the beach and stay there. The gigantic ones rising out of the water populated by seals and sports fishermen in season show vividly the course of such wearing away of the fastland over the years. Ultimately, Split Rock in Hither Woods, almost 100 feet above sea level and about as inland as you can get in the hamlet of Montauk, will become one of those offshore rocks. Enjoy it while you can.

Increasingly frequent coastal storms and steadily rising sea level will eventually reduce Montauk to a rock pile. Fort Pond, notwithstanding the barrier presented by the railway berm immediately to its north, Big Reed Pond and Oyster Pond east of it, and Fresh (or Hidden) Pond in Hither Woods will all drop into the sea in the same way that the pond above Cavett’s Cove and ones to the east and west of it went over the bluff at the beginning of the new millennium.

Brushy Island in the northwest corner of Fort Pond (Long Island’s second largest freshwater pond after Lake Ronkonkoma) and Star Island in Lake Montauk are barometers of the future. Brushy island was populated by tupelo trees as late as 1995. Twenty years later a few snags remain but the island is completely under water. Sea level’s rise has accounted for most of that; less dense freshwater on top of underlying denser seawater rises accordingly with sea rise. Brushy Island is already a ghost. The same fate awaits Star Island, unless of course fill is brought in to keep up with sea-level rise.

Both Lake Montauk and Fort Pond used to be seapoosed by the Montauketts and colonists, we are told. The evidence for seapoosing is markedly obvious on an 1892 U.S. coastal map of Montauk. That is how, undoubtedly, Fort Pond got its freshwater mussels. Big Fresh Pond in North Sea also has them. Alewives carry the larvae in their gills while at sea, and when they enter freshwater to spawn, the larvae drop off and become miniscule bivalve shellfish. Alewives are no longer in Fort Pond; they were cut off by the building of the railroad at the turn of the century, but Lake Montauk still gets them, and both Big Reed Pond and Stepping Stones Pond on the east and west sides of the lake with surface water connections to it have had breeding populations in the past.

Yes, we can cap carbon emissions, but it’s already too late to save Montauk and most of the rest of Long Island from an ultimate watery grave. In the meantime let’s cherish what God gave us and enjoy the sea and its biological riches. Anyone up for a little mahimahi washed down with some delicious Long Island wine?

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

The fall is here, my favorite time of the year. The Hamptons are still the Hamptons, but the traffic is diminished, things slow down, the sky is beautiful, and the leaves turn myriad colors before they fall to the ground in November. It’s the time of the great bird migration and the harvesting of fish and shellfish, just like in the old days.

A week and a half ago three ospreys circled about 300 yards up over my house in Noyac, 100 feet off the bay. The uttered their “peet” notes, pausing after each, and circled and circled and circled slowly off to the west. I called back to them with the same whistled note that I have perfected over the years and they answered. In my mind they were saying, “Good-bye, see you next spring.” Isn’t it amazing that ospreys, like so many other of God’s creatures, have psyches of their own and perhaps even a world view, or as the Germans say, “weltanschauung.” Yes, they have to take care of the basics, i.e., satisfy the four basic drives — food, shelter, health, procreation — but these three ospreys were preoccupied with the wonderfulness of being able to make lazy circles in the sky under a full sun and on such a lovely day.

When it comes to shelter, wild birds find it under tree leaves or in nests, mammals, under trees or in holes, the human mammal in houses, condos, and apartments that have a very long history in the making. Human shelters in the Hamptons have become more than places to eat, sleep, and get out of the cold; they’ve become statements of wealth, standing, and traveling to and from them with ease.

Architects who design them and landscapers who wrap them in foliage would add the word “beauty.” In a way they are artists, and architecture is one of the great arts, along with painting, sculpting, ballet, symphonic music, and the rest of them. Around here they go up pretty fast and are in a large way responsible for the “trade parade” that greets each morn and says “so long” come later afternoon.

Having grown up in the Depression and during World War II, the house as a magnificent thing rather than a cozy place is beyond my ken. And what I have the hardest time understanding is why one house has to be razed to build another in its stead. My first 22 years on Long Island were spent on the North Fork. During the period, as well as I can remember and from listening to my parents, not a single dwelling was razed locally in order to build another.

Long before recycling became a modus operandi for the generation Xers and millennials, it was a way of life in Mattituck. Almost nothing was thrown out; almost everything was reused in one way or another. Yes, certain structures were rehabilitated and in that rehabilitation new materials replaced old ones, but the old ones, such as bricks, timbers, slates, pipes, etc., found their way to lots where they would await reuse. The one closest to home was the site of the North Fork Wrecking Company. As in the Arlo Guthrie song “Alice’s Restaurant,” you could get just about anything you needed there.

Tearing down houses and imploding buildings to construct new ones didn’t get started in a big way until the latter part of the 1900s. Now it’s a common

occurrence. One house in particular that strikes a chord is the one in which the late coastguardsman and fisherman Norman Edwards lived in on Atlantic Avenue in Amagansett only a block up from one of East Hampton Town’s his- toric districts. It was razed last year and replaced with a Farrellized edifice al- most instantaneously.

It was only 10 years old and served Norman and his wife, Lynda, well during that time and was a pretty house to drive by or visit. Then, poof, gone in an instant! And what of the stuff of which it was made?

Such is the way of the construction business, especially the second-home business, as practiced today. Granted, a few houses are moved off site and relo- cated before new ones takes their place, but only a few.

What a terrible waste! And at what a price to the aesthetics of the community and the congestion on the roads? When I lived in Oregon I was surrounded by Douglas firs, huge majestic trees 200 feet tall. Now the only Doug fir that I see are the boards and studs in the lumberyards and on their way to some second home, absent of branches, shaved clean and symmetrical, hardly a substi- tute for the real thing.

It’s one thing to cut down a living tree to mill into lumber. It’s another thing to throw the lumber away or bury it when you’re through with it. Wood can last a very long time. Europe is full of 1,000- year-old houses made mostly of wood, and we have several 300-year-old wood- en houses right here on Long Island, such the Mulford house in East Hampton and the Old House in Cutchogue on the North Fork.

So let’s get right down to it. We cut down more trees than we need to in order to feed the appetites of the well-to-do, thus leaving few trees to take up the carbon dioxide that is overheating the atmosphere and we call ourselves eco- logic and sustainable?

Maybe those circling ospreys were trying to tell me something has them “peeted” off. After all, they come back to the same abode year after year and as long as that abode works after a little rebuilding now and then they continue to use it throughout their lifetimes. Were they snickering?

The small bumper sticker caught my eye a few days ago in a parking lot at the beach. Its message included the ubiquitous heart hieroglyph that stands for the word “love.” Montauk, the whole East End was suffused with silver light that reflects off the sea at the time of the autumnal equinox when the sun sinks lower on the horizon. I call it Silver September.

Fall fell on Sept. 23, when the center of the sun crossed south of the equator. This year, the crossing was attended by a number of events that would have sent the ancients scurrying. The blood-red eclipse of the supermoon, for instance, and the discovery of water on Mars.

The ancients aren’t the only ones. This week in Mecca during the Hajj, Muslim pilgrims approached a wall symbolizing the Devil with stones to take part in the ritual of “stoning the Devil.” Apparently the Devil took offense and over 700 celebrants died in a stampede. By contrast, Pope Francis, preaching, “let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” kept his in his pocket and completed triumphant visits to Cuba and the United States. No judgment here, I’m just sayin’, the trepidation of the spheres seemed to be especially trepidacious, and it was against this backdrop my eye caught the bumper sticker, which read: “I [heart] peeing in my wetsuit.”

What joy. And, on top of that my friend Peter brought me a black sea bass he’d caught at the spot called the Pocketbook, about six miles north of Montauk Harbor. I headed, gutted, and scaled it using my new scaler of Japanese design, and then fried and ate it with sauce of ginger, garlic, and soy. The point is, it’s important to appreciate the simple things during such transformative times.

Peter said he caught two sea bass and would have caught more had a contagion of dogfish (sand sharks) not descended on the spot. He reported seeing a few schools of false albacore, a presence confirmed by Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, who keeps track of what’s going on in Gardiner’s Bay. So I reckon the fly fishermen and light-tackle aficionados will begin casting their brains loose after falsies, although the weather promises to keep them at bay for a few days.

“There was a 26-pound [striped] bass taken at first light at Indian Wells this morning,” Bennett texted on Monday, “so the blood and moon and eclipse were good for something, but I couldn’t stop howling at the darn thing.”

Bennett: “Porgies are still in the bay, snappers all over, but this could be their last week. Bunker all over the bay, albacore and big blues in the rip, but too many sea robins. The horsefoot was released on last night’s moon. Bug, what are you going to do with a 300-pound horsefoot anyway,” Bennett said referring to the conclusion of an experiment he claims was conducted in Accabonac Harbor during the summer by aliens who genetically engineered a horseshoe crab (“horsefoot” in Bonac parlance) to grow to otherworldly proportions. My question is, where was it released to?

I’m skeptical, but then again a whole lot of people were throwing stones at the Devil and consuming the body and blood of Jesus just a few days ago. And the moon bled, for God’s sake, and water on Mars? Perhaps that’s where the horsefoot went.

Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported a steady take of striped bass “up front” under the Montauk Lighthouse and the Moorland rocks, as one might expect given day after day of east winds pushing bass and their prey within casting distance.

The deadline to enter the Montauk Surfmasters fall classic tournament is Sunday. It gets under way on Monday. Would-be entrants can apply at Paulie’s. On Saturday, the organizers will be offering a casting clinic by Craig Cantelmo and the Van Stall company, reel manufacturers. The clinic is aimed at kids, but is open to anyone. It will cover safety tips — you don’t want to hook the back of your head. It will be held starting at 8 a.m. at the beach access down the road from Paulie’s Tackle shop. I say suffer the children (of all ages) who “heart” peeing in their wetsuits in the September silver while there’s still time.

So, I’m standing at the beach with a late-summer visitor, an old friend, looking across Coke bottle-green waves to the horizon, and he says, “You’re so lucky.”

Lucky? Made me think. Sure, I’m lucky in the cosmic sense. I’m alive, in relatively good shape. But, he meant, I’m lucky to be living in Montauk. That’s true too, but it’s a different kind of lucky, like a magnet must feel stuck to the door of a refrigerator. I’m here because forces, seen and unseen, drew me here and required that I stay.

I looked around me that day. The smell of fresh oil paint was in the air. The itinerant painter was at it. He had his paintings on display against the fence, primitive beach scenes, and he was working on a new one. There was the surfer who owned her own landscaping business, the retired fireman and bow hunter who hosts a drum circle each week, the retired eye surgeon, the tall man with the flowing white beard who claims credit for every sunny day and believes the chamber of commerce should give him a stipend. The man with the successful catering business was checking the waves. They were all checking the waves.

Over on the bench was the man with the mind that’s slipping, with the incredible memory, who grew up here and remembers things I experienced that I forgot years ago. Down the beach a ways was a gathering of kids, the next generation of Ditch Plain “groms,” surfers, the children of surfers who will probably — like their parents — be the parents of surfers one day.

Some of these people are my good friends. Others are familiar, fellow magnets. We are stuck to this particular beach and return to it daily like breeding salmon, the steering wheels of our cars unable to pass Ditch Plain Road without turning just for a look at the sea, the waves. Park the car, stroll down to the beach, sit on a bench or one of the logs, take a walk, lie in the sand, get a cup of coffee at the Ditch Witch — get straight.

“Keep your head at the beach” is an old mantra, one that I was indeed lucky to have absorbed from my parents, for whom the beach was a sacred place. Both were from upstate New York, outdoor people, he a hunter, she a farm girl, neither comfortable inside the house. It didn’t matter the weather. We went to the beach every weekend, Jones Beach when I was a kid. The only other people walking in the snow along the boardwalk in winter seemed to be European. Is the need to be out in the wind and weather a cultural thing? I think so.

And, its appreciation is not something kids should have to wait for until the day they stand next to a friend and say, “You’re so lucky.”

There are the “important” things, school and career, but my visitor reminded me of my requirement for spiritual sustenance on a daily basis — a church, if you will — a place within reach, which rhymes with beach.

We all know about the Venus flytrap. It’s a carnivorous plant that lives sparingly in the coastal Carolinas and catches insects in its trap. How many of us, however, know that right here on the East End we have more than a handful of such plants, which eke out a living by catching and eating insects.

Depressions in dunes that fill with native groundwater for part of the year are favorite places for a bunch of flowering plants that are not only attractive but unique in other ways. They have carved out niches in spots with very low mineral contents where flowering plants that require nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, magnesium, and other natural elements would have a hard time getting started.

It’s not that these unique pothole plants don’t require nutrients; they have evolved very special ways of acquiring them — in many cases, not from the water or wet soil they reside in, but from the air surrounding them. They attract insects, trap them with sticky hairs or cups of liquid, then digest them in the same manner as animals digest their foodstuffs, with specific enzymes and catalysts.

These are the insectivorous plants of science fiction movies and books, but, unlike in the movies, they are not capable of ingesting a human or anything much larger than a horsefly. They get by winningly on the small stuff, especially that which they can attract with colors, odors, or other enticements.

Long Island is not known for its rich flora, say the way inland areas like Appalachia are, but it has its share of unusual insectivorous plants, particularly because its glacial, Aeolian, and wave-washed soils are, for the most part, lacking in essential plant nutrients.

The largest of the carnivorous plants is Sarracenia purpurea, the purple pitcher plant. It has red-purple flowers and spiraling conic leaves. The tips of the leaves are wet with a slippery fluid that not only attracts insects but also slides them down the inner column of the leaf into a vat of digestive fluids mixed in water. Very few insects that land on the edges of the leaves make it out alive.

You can find a bunch of them in the bogs off Route 51 in the Town of Southampton. While the pitcher plant is death to intruding insects, it is a home to myriad rotifers, midges, protozoans, and other so-called inquiline micro-organisms that commune in the wetness and share the bounty from the digestion of befallen insects.

There is one insect with wings that makes it in and out of the pitcherplants’ pitchers with ease. It is the pitcher plant mosquito, Wyeomyia smithii. In fact, it trusts its host so much that it deposits its eggs in the pitcher’s water, just as the mosquito that bites you at home lays its eggs in an old tire, can, or fish pond. The larvae hatch from eggs, feed on the smaller organisms swimming around, and eventually morph into adults that aren’t normally sanguineous — the female doesn’t require a blood meal in order to lay fertilized eggs. Thus humans, other mammals, birds, reptiles, and other critters are not bothered by it except in a few areas around Arkansas and Texas at the bottom of its range, where it can look for blood before depositing a second egg crop.

Closer to home are the three species of sundews that reside on the North and South Forks. They also have pretty-colored diminutive flowers and leaves covered with fine glandular hairs that stick to and close on any insect that lands on them. There are two sundews with normal-looking leaves except for the thick covering of reddish glistening hairs — the round-leaved sundew and the spatulate-leaved sundew. The third and most spectacular of the three is the thread-leaf, so called because its leaves are erect, longish thin cylinders, not at all leaf-like, but covered with the same glistening reddish hairs. The flower stalks get to be six inches tall and so, in a way, the thread-leaf has a decided advantage over it smaller cousins.

All three can be found occupying the same square foot of damp soil, however. Perhaps it is a case of “the more the merrier,” in other words the more glistening red hairs, the more likely that flying insects will be drawn to them.

There is a third group of carnivorous plants residing locally. They tend to be aquatic or subaquatic and are called bladderworts. You can find them in Scoy Pond, Crooked Pond, and, in fact, almost any longstanding freshwater pond around that is low in nutrients. Some are floating, like the purple bladderwort; some, like the horned bladderwort, are anchored to the substrate below.

All of these bladderworts have little “catch-’em-alive” traps, or appendages, with “teeth” that close around the aquatic insects that wander into them. Like the lobster trap or crab pot, there is no practical way out once inside. They also have colorful flowers that can rise above the surface of the water. Almost all flying insects are attracted to pretty flowers.

In terms of numbers, the pitcher plants have the fewest species, only three altogether in North and South America. The sundews are more common, with almost 190 different species. Utricularia, or bladderworts, are the most common, with well over 200 species, and are found on every continent except Antarctica, maybe because two-thirds of the earth’s surface is water.

Long, long before the era of fancy outdoor optical instruments for viewing nature, some sharp naked eyes set in patient immobile frames were able to tell that the little sundews and their brethren trapped insects. It was Charles Darwin who had the patience in the 1860s to sit and watch sundew for hours until an insect landed on one, moved, and those glistening hairs fenced it in. His book published in 1875, “Insectivorous Plants,” started an entirely new field in botany, and served to support his theory of natural selection.

Apparently, insectivorous plants evolv­ed from several different plant groups and most likely are still evolving today. One wonders, however, with all the nutrients available in the world’s thick blanket of atmospheric pollution, if evolution in these plants will begin to turn around and proceed in the other direction.

Let’s talk bones. On Sunday, we sailed Leilani to the Gardiner’s Island porgy grounds. Before we set sail, I walked across the street to the West Lake Marina (it’s still the West Lake Fishing Lodge in my mind) to buy a package of frozen clam bait. 

We had a 10-knot wind out of the southeast to give Leilani a broad reach to the north end of the island, where the porgies are thick, both in numbers and individual heft. En route, and with confidence that the boat rod would bend early and often, we called a few friends to see if they wanted a porgy or two, or three, or four, or as many as they wanted. I already knew the answer: “No thanks, too many bones.”

The answer always reminds me of Cecil Wood, a native of the island of Tobago (one of the two islands that form the nation of Trinidad-Tobago, formerly part of the British West Indies), where a few Montaukers including myself repaired during the winter months in the ’80s to surf. We lived in the village of Black Rock on Mount Irving Bay, where we met Cecil and his extended family. 

Back then, the men of Black Rock joined forces to set a semicircular seine from shore just as East Hampton baymen do to this day, but without benefit of gasoline-powered winches. After the net was set, the people of Black Rock would help haul it ashore. Except for the bigger reef fish, as well as tuna and barracuda that went to market, the rest of the catch was divvied up among those who helped bring the catch ashore.

We helped haul and would bring our share — a mix of small fish unknown to us — to Cecil to work his magic with a dish he called “fish tea,” a broth that included potatoes, a few herbs, vegetables, flour dumplings, whole fish, pepper sauce, and always with a splash of rum. It was so good that to me it seemed downright medicinal. I could not get enough.

One year, we brought Cecil to Montauk. He had never been off Tobago and it was November. “Cold, cold, cold,” he said. We told him that the real cold had not yet arrived, which he found hard to believe. I asked if he’d make a fish tea. He agreed and we went over to the West Lake Fishing Lodge to see if anyone had a cod or two to sell. I’ll never forget the look on Cecil’s face as fishermen filleted their catch and tossed the cod racks — heads and bones — into the waste bins. I secured a fish and we were about to leave when Cecil asked if we could take an extra head or two from the garbage can. Of course, I said, nobody wanted them. Such waste was unknown to Cecil, unforgivable.

We got home and he set about preparing the most delicious fish chowder I have ever had, all the while explaining, between gulps of rum and as the cod heads simmered on the stove, that it was the bones that gave the tea, or any fish dish, its flavor. I knew this, and I knew that our country is about the only one in the world that fillets fish and throws the bones away. There are cultural reasons for this, one of which was how frozen fish sticks (required back when the Catholic church demanded fish be eaten on Fridays) gave fish a bad name.

Bone prejudice is waning, but many fish eaters are still wary. They feel that skeletons make preparing and eating fish more difficult. Not true.

The preparation of a porgy dinner is an object lesson in how to overcome bone fear. Yes, porgies (scup as they’re known in New England and among commercial fishermen) are bony, they have scales, and they are relatively small, all of which makes them hard to fillet. So, don’t fillet them.

We passed by Captain Meat just north of Tobaccolot, a good sign, as he is one of Montauk’s more productive pinhookers, or commercial rod-and-reel fishermen. Sure enough, not two minutes after anchoring up and dropping the porgy rig 14 feet to the bottom, the rod bent and didn’t stop bending until I had six hefty porgies in the bucket, “enough,” first mate Kyle announced, seeing as how our bone-wary friends had demurred.

She also demanded that each porgy was dispatched with a knife to “put them out of their misery,” an ethical thing to do, of course, as well as a way to bleed them, always a good idea, along with plenty of ice, to forestall any ripening.

Actually, these Gardiner’s Island porgs were big and fat enough to fillet, but I have a “bone-in” recipe that can’t be beat. The sail back to Montauk Harbor was a challenge. The east in the wind forced us to tack 20 degrees north of a straight shot, and then to fire up the iron wind, the engine, for the last leg into the inlet. The porgies rested in an icy bath.

Back home, I grabbed a heavy knife, a scaling tool, and a large bowl and brought them to the picnic table out back. Off with their heads. I know I probably shouldn’t, but I leave the heads on the lawn knowing they will be gone the next morning, having fed the family of raccoons in the night.

The porgies were headed and gutted and their scales were scraped off. I then made three slices a few inches apart on each side of the fish. They were then dipped in a marinade of soy sauce and ginger. I marinate them overnight.

If I still had a smoker, I would have smoked three of them, but I don’t. Instead, I took them out of their marinade, and into the slices I slathered a mixture of mayonnaise, lime juice, and minced garlic. Then I wrapped them in aluminum oil. At this point, you can either put them on a grill, in a saucepan with olive oil, or in the oven. I chose the oven this time around. Yum!

Once cooked, the slices stand off the bones of the spine, bite-size. Once the meat of one side of the porgy is eaten, the spine is easily lifted off to lay bare the boneless other side of the fish for easy eating. We ate three porgies hot out of the oven and put the other three in the refrigerator to be consumed cold on Tuesday.

I like them cold. For some reason, the porgies’ subtle flavor is stronger. Makes for great puupuus (finger food). Same with black sea bass. I hope to catch one today. Baked, bone-in, with ginger. Wow!

Growing up on the rural North Fork surrounded by potato fields and water in the mid-1900s was idyllic for most of us. You could work as soon as you could walk, ride your bike anywhere day or night, play outside games like marbles, tag, hide-and-seek, giant steps, listen, look, taste, smell, and touch. You felt safe and secure.

We had calendars but mostly we got to know the change of seasons by the temperature outside, how long or short the days were, whether the ground was covered with snow or green grass, were there leaves on the trees and were they green, was there ice on the pond, and so on.

Everything was seasonal. The robins would be the first birds to show up in the spring; you wouldn’t hear the honking of geese and quacking of ducks until the fall. Spring peepers would call after the first spring rains, whippoorwills in the first week of May, lightning bugs would light up in July, tree crickets and katydids wouldn’t get stridulating until the middle of summer. Parent birds would raise their young beginning in late April and fledge them all by August. You would only see white-throated sparrows in winter, never in summer.

Farming was the chief occupation and vegetable crops were the chief agricultural pursuit. When the asparagus shot up in the spring, you knew what would follow: green peas, string beans, corn, squash, potatoes, tomatoes, and melons. Cauliflower and brussels sprouts were always the last to ripen; they didn’t peak until mid-November.

Hard clams were the first shellfish to be harvested, scallops the last. One went by the rule: only take shellfish, in particular, oysters, during months, with the letter R in them. Blue-claw crabs didn’t show up in harvestable numbers until August.

For fish it was the same. Winter flounders were the first to bite in the very early spring, frostfish, or whiting, the last to be caught in the winter. In between it was, in order, weakfish, porgies, fluke, blowfish, black sea bass, bluefish, snappers, and blackfish. We didn’t have many striped bass around in those days.

As for farm-raised fruit, we all had fruit trees and berry plants. It went something like this: strawberries, raspberries, peaches, pears, apples, walnuts. As for fruit gleaned from the wilds, blueberries came first, then black raspberries, elderberries, and black cherries, with beach plums bringing up the rear. We didn’t have cranberries; we had to steal them from the South Fork and Riverhead bogs.

You might say we were among the last of the hunter-gatherers of the 20thcentury, certainly in New York. We ate well, raising our own chickens, ducks, pigs, goats, and cows. We were poor, but never went hungry. We gathered and caught what we ate with our hands and feet as much as with special implements such as clam rakes. We could even catch blowfish with our hands.

Almost everybody clammed or picked fruit and vegetables. Picking was as much fun as eating what we picked. As the summer progressed and the days started getting shorter, you began to think of the coming schooldays, which invariably started right after Labor Day.

It turns out that Labor Day was not only the last day to celebrate the joys of summer, but was also one of the best days to catch snappers, baby bluefish born of the year. Just about every one of both sexes and all ages spent a day snapper fishing; the days just before the beginning of the new school year were always the most productive.

We didn’t catch them with our hands but we did use a rather primitive method: bamboo poles provided by the local hardware store, Duryea’s. We tied a piece of ordinarysw string to the end of the pole and a small hook to the end of the string. Spearing, or Atlantic silversides, were the best bait. We caught them with little fine-mesh nets. The best place to catch snappers was just inside the inlet to Mattituck Creek. In an hour you could catch 20 or so. They always put up a bit of a fight. My father got to spend very little time fishing because he was always busy baiting our hooks.

As I think back, those snappers tasted very good pan-fried, not oily and overly fishy like their parents tasted. Of course we asked our parents if we could return the next day for another creel full, but before they could answer we knew that they would say, “No, come morning, you’re off to school. Make sure you’re prepared.” That is how summer would end, just like that, not with a bell or a buzzer, but with a wimper.