Sendero Luminoso, the organization of Maoist revolutionaries of Peru, always comes to mind when I’m offshore on a boat that’s shark fishing. This only makes sense because of the dream state one drifts into while, well, drifting, as the crew spills ground fish and fish chunks overboard to create un sendero luminoso, a shining path that wanders toward the horizon as time passes, a route for hungry sharks to follow until they meet the boat’s baited hooks.

On Saturday, the shining path drifted west on the tide 14 miles south of Montauk Point from the Last Mango, one of the boats participating in this season’s Carl Darenberg Memorial Shark’s Eye no-kill tournament held from the Montauk Marine Basin.

In fact, revolution was in the air, and has been since the late Carl Darenberg, owner of the Montauk Marine Basin, broke with bloody tradition three years ago to create a catch-tag-and-release shark tournament with the help of a number of conservation-minded locals and the support of Jimmy Buffett, the Last Mango’s skipper.

Competing boats and the “chase boats” that observed and recorded the action fished both Saturday and Sunday. A total of 66 sharks were tagged and released. Sixty-two received conventional research tags to identify the time and place of their tagging in the event they are caught again. The dorsal fins of three sharks were outfitted with special GPS tags that will allow them to be tracked via satellite as they go about their normal migrations.

Twenty-two of the sharks were makos, 42 were blue sharks, and there was 1 thresher and 1 hammerhead, all tagged and released.

The Free Nicky boat, with Capt. Nick Raccanelli at the helm and Joe Gaviola and Jim Brown in the fighting chair, took top honors after releasing 14 sharks, one of which was a 175-pound mako that was fitted with a satellite tag and given the name Carl, in honor of the tournament’s founder.

Capt. Richie Nessel’s Nasty Ness with Dan Christman and Dave White on board took second place. The Nasty tagged and released 12 sharks. Third-place honors went to Capt. Gary Sevard’s Tiger Shark boat.

Capt. Dave Grimes’s Susan G satellite-tagged two sharks. The first was a 300-pound thresher, given the name Susan G. It was the first thresher ever to be given a GPS tag. The crew also attached a GPS tag to a 100-pound smooth hammerhead that they named Elijah.

The Montauk Marine Basin extended special thanks to the tournament sponsors, the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation, Tom O’Donoghue and Associates, the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation, and the South Fork Natural History Museum, as well as Dr. Greg Skomal’s crew for attaching the three satellite tags. A closing statement from the Marine Basin read: “Lastly, we would like to thank Rav Freidel for coordinating the whole tournament. Without these people this tournament would not be possible.”

All three of the GPS-tagged sharks can be tracked on the Ocearch.org website. Carl, Susan G, and Elijah will also be tracked at the Montauk Lighthouse Museum’s Oceans Institute. Also known as the Montauk Surf Museum, the institute will celebrate a soft opening on Saturday evening with a screening of “The Endless Summer,” Bruce Brown’s surfing travelogue. The film that launched a million surfboards will be inducted into the Smithsonian Institution’s collection of important American artifacts next month in Washington, D.C. “The Endless Summer” first hit the big screen 50 years ago this summer.

The screening will be held outside on the north lawn at the Montauk Lighthouse. The gate opens at 6 p.m. to give visitors an opportunity to glimpse what’s in the works: the institute’s combination of surfing history and explanation of the natural forces behind surfing, as well as other coastal phenomena. The cost is $20 for adults, $10 for kids.

And, speaking of surfing, “Surf Craft: Design and Culture of Board Riding” will be presented at the Longhouse Reserve in East Hampton on Friday, July 31, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Over 40 boards will be displayed, their shapes spanning the history of the craft of surfboard design.

On the way offshore on Saturday, shark boats passed a flotilla of smaller craft whose crews were busy angling for black sea bass, that delicious species. Simply remove head, gut, and scales, make three or four cuts on each side, place ginger slices in cuts, marinate in soy sauce, and bake. You’ll think you’re in Indonesia.

The split recreational season for sea bass opened on July 15 and will run until Oct. 31, then reopen from Nov. 1 until Dec. 31.

Besides the excitement over sea bass, sportfishermen have had big and very big bluefish to contend with. According to Paul Apostolides at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk, the blues are ranging from 3 to 16 pounds, inshore, offshore, everywhere. Now, I know that not everyone likes bluefish, but I do when they are bled immediately after being caught and kept on ice. Duryea’s outdoor restaurant on Fort Pond Bay in Montauk is the only restaurant around that still serves broiled bluefish. Delicious. And, of course, smoked bluefish rocks.

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports “fluke up to 24 inches” in Gardiner’s Bay and, speaking of bluefish, an earlier than usual run of snapper blues. “We have porgies, big porgies, and freshwater fishing has been unreal in Fort Pond.”

Oh, and a cautionary note: En route back to Montauk Harbor on Saturday, the crew of the Last Mango espied a man hanging on to his fishing kayak about a mile off the Point and heading south with the ebbing tide.

We picked him up, shaken, frightened, and thankful. He explained that his yak capsized when it met that dangerous combination of wind against tide. The fish well in the forward section of the kayak filled with water and he was unable to right it. He lost a $400 fishing rod and reel, but lived to fish another day. Fortunately, he was wearing a life jacket and wetsuit.

The moral of the story is this: Know where you’re fishing. The tidal rip currents around Montauk Point are extremely dangerous, especially for small craft, and especially for anglers who don’t do their research. In this day of GPS chart plotters, tide charts, and very high frequency radios that blare with marine weather forecasts, there is little excuse for not knowing the basics about the waters you’re entering.

Capt. Mike Vegessi of the Lazybones party boat out of Montauk was named Fishing Legend of the Year at the Montauk Mercury Grand Slam fishing competition held on Saturday and Sunday from Uihlein’s Marina.

The Kiwanis Club of East Hampton and the Montauk Friends of Erin sponsored the tournament.

Since Captain Mike, as he’s called, and his wife, Kathy, the shoreside mate, are celebrating their 31st year in business, the honor made the anniversary even sweeter. A humble man of few words, the captain said he was excited and honored to have received the award, which is given each year to a local boat captain.

When the couple bought the boat from Capt. Bill Butler in 1985 they focused on making it a family-friendly venture. They changed the schedule from a full day of fishing to two half-day trips, one from 8 a.m. to noon and the other from 1 to 5 p.m. They called the vessel the Lazybones because unlike other fishing boats, it doesn’t leave the harbor at the crack of dawn.

It was good idea. The boat, which fishes from May through Dec. 15, is almost always full, with many repeat customers, some of whom have become lifelong friends with the Vegessis and even bunk at their house in Montauk.

For a while the boat was a true family business, with the couple’s two daughters, Rebecca Gagnon and Serena Schick, who is also a licensed captain, working as mates before they left to start their own families. Kathy Vegessi handles all phone reservations, collects the money, and throws out the lines when the boat returns to port.

Captain Mike runs a tight ship. The bright blue boat is cleaned after each trip and at the end of the day the deck and outdoor seating is scrubbed and hosed down. “It’s nice to fish from a boat that doesn’t smell like fish,” said a woman on Monday. The mates are instructed to be friendly and helpful. Some of them have grown up working the boat, starting as bucket boys.

The couple offer discounted rates for children’s groups and are always quick to donate trip tickets for local raffle prizes. For instance, on Sunday they hosted a group from Camp SoulGrow, a nonprofit children’s camp that offers activities free of charge.

The couple are so well known by customers that even when they vacation during the winter, no matter where they are, it’s inevitable that someone yells out to them, “Hey, Lazybones.”

During the award ceremony on Sunday, which was held under a tent at Uihlein’s, Captain Mike had another reason to celebrate: His mates, Joe McDonald, Mike DeMelio, and Ben McCarron, won the top Grand Slam prize in the recreational division while fishing from an uncle’s boat. For their effort they won a Mercury 150-horsepower motor, a trophy, and a cash prize, the amount of which had not been disclosed as of press time.

You may have noticed that most of the songbirds have stopped singing and are either preparing to nest again or, more likely, just help their fledglings along while simultaneously nudging them away. Young-of-the-year ospreys have either already fledged or are standing in their nests flapping their wings in earnest as they anticipate the moment of departure.

While the birdcalls wane, the insects take the stage with their sounds, flights, pheromone secretions, and even lights. On Saturday, the 21st anniversary of the TWA crash into the ocean off Fire Island, the snowy tree crickets began to utter their trills in warm-up sessions in the early evening. It’s early in the season, but ironically, perhaps, on the evening of that tragic air crash they also began to sing. On Sunday morning they were so eager to get going that they sang while the sun shone brightly, a bit out of fashion for the nocturnal chorusers they are. On Monday evening they were in full form. In most years tree crickets and katydids don’t begin their nightly singing until the end of July or beginning of August.

The humid hot spell that started on Saturday may have been the catalyst. On Sunday evening it was both hotter and more humid. A perfect time for fireflies to come out in force, and out in force they came. I went with my grandson, Matthew, from San Francisco, where they don’t have fireflies, to census them on the South Fork, starting in eastern Southampton and ending up in East Hampton.

The moon hadn’t reached the first quarter and the skies were mostly clouded over — perfect, for the little lights these flying insects in the beetle group put out. Starting in Sag Harbor and ending up in Noyac, we counted 194 different flashing fireflies as we cruised at about 30 miles per hour along the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike, Brick Kiln, Old Sag Harbor, Millstone, Scuttlehole, Sagg, and Town Line Roads, and Parsonage Lane before entering East Hampton. Wainscott Northwest and Daniel’s Hole Roads came next. It was 8:35 and Matthew was still counting fireflies and writing them down in the dusky light.

Then, something odd befell us. After we reached Route 114 and it was almost dark, we didn’t see any fireflies. We recorded not a single flash on Whooping Hollow Road, Stephen Hand’s Path, Two Holes of Water Road, Bull Path, Old Northwest Road, and Swamp Road.

Matthew, who will be a high school senior next year and is contemplating a scientific education thereafter, came up with an interesting hypothesis: Maybe the male fireflies only flash at dusk, when they can still make out their potential mates flashing in the groundcover below. After that, if they flash they might be subject to increased predation from crepuscular fliers such as whippoorwills and bats.

In all we traveled 35 miles. From 7:45 to 8:50, we counted 194 fireflies along 8.5 miles of roads for an average of 22.82 fireflies per mile. They were more common to the south — say, along Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton and Parsonage Road in Sagaponack — than to the north. It was encouraging to find so many at a time when honeybees, butterflies, fireflies, and other insect populations have become noticeably low.

The firefly, or lightning bug, that we were studying is the Pennsylvania firefly, Photuris pennsylvanica, the most common and widespread member of the family Lampyridae. Some fireflies don’t emit light pulses, but use pheremones to attract mates. There are fireflies all over the world, but they are rare west of the Rocky Mountains in the United States. In parts of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, hundreds of fireflies flash simultaneously, lighting up the trees they’re perched in, creating quite a spectacle. Similar firefly flashes in unison are recorded regularly in parts of Tennessee in the Great Smokey Mountains and in South Carolina. People congregate in such areas in early June on an annual basis to take in the show.

While I was in the Army and stationed in Japan, I visited a park in Tokyo where the annual firefly exhibition receives a great number of observers, both parents and children, not unlike the way we in America turn out for the annual July fireworks shows. The glow emitted by the light organ at the end of the firefly abdomen is called “cold” light and is one of the most efficient lights in terms of cost in energy. With incandescent light from a lightbulb 10 percent of the energy is used as light, 90 percent as heat. Florescent lights use 90 percent for light, only 10 goes off as heat. The fireflies’ glow produces no heat; 100 percent of the luciferin-luciferase reaction behind each pulse is emitted as light.

The larvae hatch from eggs laid in damp spots or rotting wood by the female and take a year or more to mature. Both the eggs and the larvae are luminescent. Interestingly, the larvae feed on snails, slugs, worms, and other small organisms that live in and on the leaf litter and grassy swards. If you have slugs that devour flowers and certain leafy vegetables, be kind to the fireflies in your yard!

By the same token, the larvae are not very palatable, as they contain certain distasteful toxins. Considering all of its developmental stages, this little beetle that we take for granted sports a sizeable dossier of anti-predator strategies and is certainly one of the most advanced of the millions of insect species throughout the world. Perhaps that is why there are more than 2,000 firefly species. Not all of them are capable of producing light, but they have other weapons in their arsenal to keep them going.

Ironically, however, there is a predator firefly that flashes to a male firefly seeking a mate in the same species-specific code, a “hacker” of sorts. It pretends it’s a female of the same species and lures the male, then attacks it and eats it. Not unlike the praying mantis, it’s a real femme fatale!

A shiver of sand tiger sharks approached the beach from the south in downtown Montauk and a large body of bluefish that were hunting schools of smaller prey concentrated between the sharks and a bloat of boogie boarders.

How about that?  A “bloat of boogie boarders” and a “shiver of sharks.” The former description is my invention, and I like it. A “shiver” is actually — and appropriately — the word used to describe a group or school of sharks, much like a murder of crows expresses their gathering.  

The scene in the lead paragraph, although not witnessed per se, was probably enacted for real over the weekend. Surfcasters caught a few sand tigers, a.k.a. gray nurse sharks or spotted ragged-toothed sharks, according to Glenn Grothmann at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk.

Not to worry. The sand tiger, Carcharias Taurus, although a cousin to the shivery-ist of all sharks, has never been responsible for a human fatality. They are not related to tiger sharks, which have caused many a human fatality. And, the sand tiger is a protected species. They are gray with reddish-brown spots and can grow to 10 feet long. Grothmann said that at first glance, sand tigers might appear to be small threshers. They have a similar, though shorter, sickle-shaped tail.

There is little question that the sand tigers were in pursuit of bluefish. By all reports, blues are everywhere, some of them very big. This time of year, Capt. Ken Rafferty, a charter captain who specializes in light-spin-tackle and fly fishing, usually moves east from Gardiner’s Bay and the isles of Gull — his usual haunts — to Block Island Sound and around Montauk Point, where light-weight rods have been bowing deeply to the big blues.

We have been blessed by some incredibly beautiful weather as well as a large selection of sea life. In addition to the sand tigers, surfcasters working our sand beaches from Montauk west have been catching fluke on bunker chunks, as well as big porgies and triggerfish.

Triggers are a tropical and subtropical species with vivid colors and intricate patterns on their bodies. They either travel in the warm Gulf Stream water this time of year or time their northern migrations to meet it. It’s not unusual to see colorful tropical reef types this time of year.

To protect themselves from predators, they can erect a formidable dorsal spine located top and forward on their bodies. Fishermen wishing to release them should know that by depressing a second spine, the “trigger spine,” located behind the first, the first more dangerous spine is unlocked.

As for striped bass, most of the activity has been taking place by the light of the moon. A blue moon arrives tomorrow night, “blue” because that’s what you call the second full moon in a calendar month. The first bloomed on July 2. Because striped bass like to hunt by the light of the moon, bass fishermen have become loonier than usual. 

And speaking of loony, I wonder if perhaps the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol, the Coast Guard, or the various businesses that rent kayaks and stand-up paddleboards might keep paddlers from meandering around in our navigational channels, especially the Montauk Harbor inlet.

People unaccustomed to our strong tides (and the dangerous condition caused by wind blowing against strong tides) and boat wakes, can find themselves in serious trouble, especially in fog or low-light situations.

They should not assume that big fishing boats and yachts can see them, or, if they do see them, that they are able to stop or navigate around them. I was leaving the harbor last week as a group of five or six kayakers were attempting to exit the inlet in a 15-knot wind, tide racing, in heavy chop with a couple of big party boats entering the harbor. Scary. 

Kayaks and the like should not be allowed in navigational channels.

It’s been hot as Hades and unrelentingly humid. In other words, the air is almost filled to capacity with moisture, but not the kind that produces rain. Plants are wilting and songbirds are trying to stay cool by lying low and not singing.

Birdsongs may be few and far between, but the slack is taken up by singing insects. There is one insect that loves these dog days, so much that it is called the dog-day cicada. You will probably never see one, but you can’t miss the song. It’s the loud whine of a buzz saw, most commonly heard during the day shortly before noon.

It is closely related to the 17-year cicada and its pupal cast is a light brown replica of the larva that grew into it, but is empty. It’s about an inch long and is usually seen hanging upside down on the bottom surface of a leaf. I’ve seen two thus far within the last week. Before emergence, the larvae live in the ground and eat pine roots. I have a lot of white pines in the yard, which might explain their presence. Apparently, they are not found in solely deciduous forests.

If there are dog-day cicadas around, you’re liable to see a cicada killer or two — slender, sleek black wasps with yellow markings a couple of inches long. They cruise the edges of vegetation in a fast beeline flight, landing every once in a while to poke around in a nook or cranny, presumably looking for a cicada to take back to their nests. A few females get together and dig a tunnel into soil, then scoop out two or three cells where the cicadas, once stung and carried to the nest, are deposited before an egg is laid. The egg hatches out and the larva subsists on the fat cicada.

The cicada killer is one of the longest in the insect order Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, hornets, etc.), and it doesn’t waste its sting on humans. A larger insect among those in my small Noyac yard is the tooth-necked longhorn beetle, a beautiful ebony flack beetle half as wide as it is long and flattish. I have found two thus far and have one for safekeeping. It is one of the most injurious insects of them all — not the adult, mind you, but the larvae hatched from the eggs. They eat the roots of oaks and other hardwood species.

Oak trees die limb by limb slowly over a period of time, as a very large chestnut oak in my neighbor’s yard has been doing. The adult emerges from the ground to mate. You probably won’t see this beetle, but you might hear one flying on a hot night then crashing into the window of a lighted room with a loud thud.

Maybe the most beneficial beetle in my yard is the black-spotted ladybug, not a bug but a true Coleopteran. I have one hanging around the tops of my tall goldenrods, which have yet to bloom but are already four feet high. Why is it there? The leaves and stem are covered with orange aphids. At 20 or so a day, it has enough on site to last through August. Both adults and larvae, mostly black with yellow markings, feed on aphids. At first the adult was on a neighboring tiger lily chowing down on white cottony aphids. It apparently prefers the ones without the floss.

Aphids, like Argentine ants, are among the most abundant of insects. Thus, there are usually enough to feed the ladybird beetles in the yard, but also the snowy tree crickets, which are rarely seen but regularly heard, especially on warm August nights. They’ve been stridulating their monotonous songs for hours on end since the last week in July. Count the number of beats in 13 seconds and add 40 and you have the ambient temperature within a few degrees Fahrenheit. I’ve used the formula several times over the years and it works.

The other night singer in my yard is the katydid. “Katy did, Katy didn’t” goes the common refrain. Their calls are not as temperature-dependent as those of the snowy tree cricket. Come fall when the weather cools, they become long and drawn out, like the refrain on an LP record when the turntable drive begins to slip. Both sexes make the calls and it is thought that prior to mating they call to each other.

So much for the stridulating insects and those that make noise with their wings in flight. The moths are almost totally silent, as are the butterflies. Wouldn’t you know it, the most common butterfly in town is the cabbage white from Eurasia. It is doing quite well while most of the native butterflies are languishing.

The monarch is one of those last. I have yet to see a monarch this summer. On the other hand, milkweeds, the monarchs’ host of choice, have been flourishing locally.

Alex and Stella Miller of East Hampton were driving about on Friday and saw two monarchs, one in Wainscott and one in Springs near Three Mile Harbor. Among my acquaintances, Vicki Bustamante holds the record to date, at eight. My friend Peter Dermody, a geologist and hydrologist in western Southampton, tags monarchs as part of a nationwide recovery effort, but has yet to see one this year.

To step away from the insects for a moment, Karilyn Jones called on her way into town today — she saw a groundhog in the field on the south side of Montauk Highway across from the Poxabogue Golf Course, where Saga­ponack meets Wainscott. How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? K K K Katy, that’s all folks.

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

Flow. It’s what we want, not hangs. I have a friend who moved way down south to a dirt-road town called Pavones. It’s located on the southeast side of the Sweet Gulf, Golfo Dulce, not far from the Panamanian border, where some of the finest waves in the world peel along the Costa Rican coastline. His name is Harry Abrams, but we call him Flowmaster.

Harry came to mind on Friday after I attended the opening of the “Surf Craft” installation at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton. The show is a curated collection of old and new surfboards, each chosen for its place in the unending quest for perfect flow on the face of a wave.

I thought a lot about Flowmaster recently because I’m working with a talented group of locals toward the opening of the Oceans Institute of the Montauk Lighthouse Museum. Our first installation features surfboards built by Long Island board builders in the mid-to-late-1960s.

The boards, shaped by Charlie Bunger, Bob Hawkins, Jack Hannon, Peter Lutz, and Jim Campbell, were based on shapes pioneered by West Coast board builders like Dale Velzy and Hap Jacobs, who in turn came up with their designs through the experience of wave riders going back to fishermen, explorers, and anyone else who used Nature’s pulse to push them toward terra firma. At one point, the thrilling flow of the journey became the goal. To hell with its end.

Harry Abrams surfed, smoked Camels, and shaped surfboards. Back in the ’60s, while working for Bunger Surfboards in Babylon, he became obsessed with the size and shape of skegs, the fins that give surfboards their stability, allow them to turn, and hold the face of a wave. His fins got longer and more flexible until they looked like the tails of thresher sharks. The idea was to create a surfboard that would snake down and along the face of a wave.

Flowmaster had gone down the rabbit hole in a sense. The fins never worked as well on a wave as they did in his head. We snickered, starting calling him Flowmaster as a rib, and yet he was on the right track. As time went on, fins did get longer, more flexible. Flowmaster doesn’t surf that much anymore. The Camels saw to that. But he still talks flow. The last time I saw him, in Pavones, he told me he was writing a surfing ballet to be performed onstage. Ridiculous? Just wait.

On Saturday, my old friend Louis Gippetti showed up in Montauk from his home in Massachusetts. Like me, Louis is a postwar product of Levittown who got into the world of surfboard riding, design, and building in the late ’60s. We sat on the beach and talked about those times, about Louis’s designs for a flexible surfboard — way out there. We laughed, but not hard. He told me that back then he’d sent one of his designs to George Greenough of Santa Barbara, surfboard designer extraordinaire. Looking back, it was sort of like sending, from out of the blue, a design for a new kind of house to Frank Lloyd Wright.

In return mail Louis received a drawing of a bolt of lightning scratching the sky above the sea. Louis observed that between the extremes of design lies a vast “gray area” to be explored. Louis bought a new surfboard on Monday designed by Mikey DeTemple, a professional longboard surfer who calls the East End home. No money changed hands until Louis and the salesman caressed every curve in the rails, the almost invisible concave toward the nose, the sweet, subtle rocker in the tail “that holds in the foam ball” of the wave for stable nose-riding. Their words flowed as though spoken in awe above a child just breached.

The LongHouse show features a whole section devoted to the designs and concepts of Bob Simmons, who experimented in the ’50s with “planing” surfaces that he translated into boards of balsa wood, and a section that features the same George Greenough who used kneeboards to find the “slot,” the perfect trim spot in a wave.

On Sunday, beautiful Sunday, Kyle and I awoke on Lake Montauk aboard our sailboat Leilani. Fish broke the mirror surface just after dawn, causing rain bait to take to the air.

Later, we took to the one-man outrigger canoe my daughter, Melissa, and I purchased last summer from a couple moving back home to New Zealand. While attending the University of Hawaii, Melissa joined an outrigger paddling team. Our canoe is 18 feet long and weighs just 22 pounds — fast, moves like greased lightning across the smooth water.

Melissa drove out from Springs to join us. “You lean into the ama,” she said, the Hawaiian name for outrigger. She told how her coach trained them by making the six-man canoe team extend the paddle with only the top hand as far forward as possible and grab it lower down with the other hand only when the flow of the canoe threatened to steal the paddle from them. This to increase the length of the stroke.

She took off like the proverbial bat, digging deep with the paddle, gleeful, almost desperate it seemed, to feel again the flow of a craft whose design evolved over hundreds if not thousands of years, and just two months after giving birth to my granddaughter.

And later the same day, I tied a second reef in the mainsail of Leilani, our Bristol 29.9, her hull designed by Halsey Herreschoff, grandson of the genius Capt. Nathaniel Herreschoff, to see if the smaller sail would balance better with the jib in the high, gusty winds we’ve been experiencing of late, to see if it would create a sweeter flow. It did.

The inch or so of rain we had on Saturday and Sunday morning really greened up the open spaces. It was readily apparent on driving around the outback areas of Southampton and East Hampton on Monday. The vegetation had been getting thirsty. Its thirst was thusly quenched.

The South Fork is small compared to the rest of Long Island and tiny compared to the rest of New York State, but its flora ranks among the most diverse in America. Where else can you find a cranberry bog in the shadows of a pitch pine forest and a stone’s throw from heathlands and dunes? That is why after so many years pursuing birds, then fish, my main pursuit for the past 20 years has been plants.

Montauk always had the second largest prairie on Long Island after the Hempstead Plains, which is reduced to less than 50 acres or so. Since the Montauk grassland abuts the coastal waters of Block Island Sound, it is considered a maritime grassland. But if you went to Ohio where the Appalachian chain of mountains meets the lowlands, now mostly used for agriculture, you would find the same grasses that grow here: Indian nut grass, big bluestem, Deschampsia, little bluestem, and several others as well as many of the same forbs.

Montauk’s grasslands used to be kept low by fires, first set by the Montauketts, later, by the settlers who grazed their livestock in Montauk. Grasslands thrive on periodic fires. Ticks, however, don’t do so well under those conditions. Now, those same fields are slowly growing up into a savanna ecotype. They have as many shrubs as grasses and are difficult to navigate on foot without a trail to guide you through them.

They are rapidly becoming heathlands like those of Scotland and Ireland, with differing species but similar in aspect. The shads, highbush blueberries, chokeberries, black cherries, sumacs, and other shrubs and small trees dominate. They manage to resist the desiccating effects from the persistent onshore winds blowing off the ocean in summer, while taller trees don’t fare so well, except in the Point Woods where the tall bluffs shoot the wind over their tops.

You will find an enduring heathland at Shadmoor State Park, but less than a mile west of Montauk Point, a woodland as rich as any on Long Island with five species of oaks, including the rare southern red oak, Canada serviceberry, two species of hickories, alternate-leaved dogwoods, American beech, American holly, an occasional basswood, witch hazel, mountain laurel, tupelos, and red maples.

But you won’t find any native pines there. One has to go all the way to the west edge of Hither Woods where Montauk meets Napeague to find pitch pines growing in profusion. Over the last two centuries, they’ve marched out onto Napeague from the rest of Amagansett and came to an abrupt halt on the east side of the Walking Dunes. The rest of Hither Woods is a classic Appalachian deciduous woodland, with oaks, beech, ironwood, hickories, sassafras, tupelo, holly, red maple, and several other tree species.

For a time in the late 1600s and up until the middle of the 1800s, the lumber of Hither Woods was harvested, and the hilly morainal land became mostly grasslands used for grazing sheep, cattle, and other livestock. By 1923, when it was studied in detail by the eminent botanist Norman Taylor, it was already half grown up and was partially covered with eastern red cedars. Since then, the cedars have been replaced by the typical deciduous hardwoods that grow there today.

If you explore Napeague you will find that it is largely made up of heathy vegetation, pitch pines, bear oaks, and a formidable dune plain that stretches north from Montauk Highway all the way to Napeague and Gardiner’s Bays. It is practically treeless except near the highway, and dominated by bearberry, beach heather, and several low-growing flowering forbs. It is a vegetation type found nowhere else in the state.

Napeague is dotted to the west and east with potholes, “dune slacks” in England, which have a wonderful variety of cranberries, orchids, cotton grass, and many other small plants that need to keep their feet wet throughout most of the year. There are spots where the underlying water table touches the topsoil. Almost all of Napeague is barely five feet above sea level, and the freshwater aquifer it hosts is only 40 to 50 feet thick.

Leave Napeague’s west and you will come to the Stony Hill woods, which are unique because they have very little understory or forest floor carpet and are dominated by American beech, sweet birch (also called black birch), and a handful of maples, hickories, oaks, sassafras, and other woodies with a few pitch pines. They have very little of the lowbush blueberry-huckleberry carpet that typically coats openings in the pine barrens farther to the west.

The wide expanse of ocean dunes between East Hampton Village and Napeague is certainly unique. In the rest of New York, only the Sunken Forest dunes of Fire Island rival them. Those dunes are dominated by American beachgrass and other seashore-duneland plants, and have a healthy canopy of pitch pine, bear oaks, beach plums, bayberry, and highbush blueberry. Their natural status is only marred by a large number of Japanese black pines, which always seem to be in some stage of dying. There are several lines of dunes; some of them have even climbed the rise between the duneland and flatland to the north, formerly agricultural, to perch on its top.

This march inland, now put to rest by landscaping and building, can also be witnessed along Bluff Road in Amagansett, which runs east to west along the top of the old geologic bluff deposited by the retreating glacier’s alluvial outwash.

Between the village of Sag Harbor and Three Mile Harbor, a neighborhood known as Northwest Woods is a vast expanse of woods, much of which is covered with pines, mostly pitch pines to the south, white pines to the north, but a mixture nonetheless. Oaks and pitch pines are common in Wainscott’s woodlands, as typically seen along Daniel’s Hole road. They grade into the white pine-dominated Northwest Woods, which runs all the way to Gardiner’s Bay and Northwest Harbor, both parts of the Peconic Estuary. If you ride along Bull Path, Old Northwest Road, Swamp Road, and Northwest Landing Road you will see how dominant the white pines can be. A few reach 100 feet in the air and are three to four feet in diameter. If you look between the larger boles, you will see a plethora of white pine offspring. The white pine forest, at least for now, is succeeding itself.

Except for a smaller version on Shelter Island, this is the only native white pine forest on Long Island, and how it has persisted so long as such in the face of global warming is the basis of a long-standing botanical conundrum. White pines are common in New England and upstate New York, where they form a large part of the northern transitional forest, which eventually becomes North America’s version of the Siberian taiga, dominated by spruce, larch, aspens, birch, and other more boreal conifers and deciduous tree species.

I have long puzzled over these white pines and have come to the conclusion that it is the fault of the water table. The temperature of the water, which sits at root level for most of these pines, is in the mid-50s for most of the year. Thus the pines are drinking cool water when they are transpiring. The evaporation of the water from the needles’ surface further cools the trees. They think they are in Maine, when they’re actually 300 miles to the south on little old Long Island. They are the original geothermal cooling pumps.

Northwest is the only spot on Long Island, other than on Gardiner’s Island, where persimmons, if only a few, are found.

I haven’t even touched on the various wetland ecotypes, chief among them the extensive salt marshes bordering the tributaries of the Peconic Estuary. I will point out, however, that there is another native conifer, the fifth and the rarest on Long Island, after the pitch pine, eastern red cedar, white pine, and common juniper. It’s the Atlantic white cedar, but you will have to leave East Hampton and travel to North Sea or the Nature Conservancy’s Sagg Swamp Preserve in Sagaponack to see one.

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

George Knoblach turns 90 today. Like many a Montauk resident, George “discovered” this place during his family’s summer camping trips to Hither Hills State Park — only much earlier than most.

As a young man, he contracted polio, which left him paralyzed and confined to an iron lung for a time. His recovery was slow until his mother decided that water, and swimming, might be therapeutic. She was right.

“He became a fish,” in the words of Martin Pedersen, a longtime friend and fellow spearfisherman, who told me how Knoblach’s underwater skills were not confined to an astonishing ability to hold his breath and wield a speargun.

As a member of the Long Island Dolphins spearfishing club, he usually ended the season as “high hook,” or high spear in this case. An accomplished photographer above and below the surface, Knoblach developed underwater photographic techniques and equipment. He worked for Collins Engineers, an international underwater construction company, and he worked as an assistant to James Abbe, a photojournalist.

The sport that Knoblach pioneered in Montauk’s clear ocean water has become popular with a new generation of free divers who chase striped bass and other near-shore species, as well as tuna farther offshore, even traveling the world like surfers on safari in search of exotic species. Happy birthday, George, and thanks for the inspiration.

And, speaking of inspiration, I was sitting at Montauk’s Inlet Seafood restaurant on Sunday evening when a friend sitting on the stool beside me pulled out his smartphone and ordered it to conjure a photo taken after dark with a flash. It was a shot of the man’s neighbor, who had waited until the full moon rise to take his surf rod the few feet from his place in the Montauk Shores Condominium (a.k.a. trailer park) to the beach. He made one cast and hooked a 33-pound striped bass, the subject — along with the angler’s wide grin — of the photo.

Like the lush explosion of flowers, flowering trees, and everything else rooted to the ground after the hard winter just passed, it seems we are also blessed with an abundance of sea life. When unzipped, the striper in the photo was shown to have recently consumed a whole bunker, a species of oily prey that remain plentiful enough — despite the recent die-off farther west in the Peconic Estuary — to keep striped bass and bluefish feeding close at hand.

The bunker, and the full moon, might explain why the Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament ended in a wild flurry of big bass catches and near misses on Saturday. The day before, with the clock running down to the tournament’s conclusion, Mike Coppola brought a 38.86-pound striped bass to the scales at Paulie’s Tackle shop. The bass had eaten a Smokey Joe Superstrike darter lure that Coppola had cast around the rocks in one of Montauk’s moorland coves.

The fish pushed Wes O’Donnell’s 28-pounder off the leader board and moved Paul Pira into third place with the 36.1-pound bass caught on June 21. Gary Krist held onto first place with a 42.08 cow bass caught on June 12. Mary Ellen Kane and Bill Gardner made a late rush to the scales on Friday morning with 24.4 and 27.5-pound stripers respectively.

The moon and schools of bunker are also responsible for the schools of very large bluefish, which, in turn, will probably draw makos to the area in time for the Carl Darenberg Jr. Memorial Shark’s Eye no-kill shark tournament scheduled for July 18 and 19. There is still time for boats to enter at the Montauk Marine Basin.

Sunday marked the sloop Leilani’s first foray to the northeast side of Gardiner’s Island in search of porgies. The night before, her crew (that would be me and first-mate Kyle) spent the night at Leilani’s mooring on Lake Montauk where we, joined by the crew of our neighboring sailboat Astra, witnessed the re-enactment of the British attack on Fort McHenry; bright explosions way in the distance above New London, as well as Montauk’s official display off to the west. Unofficial sky bursts and accompanying percussions filled the sky from points surrounding the lake. Then the largest explosion of light, the full moon, rose in the southeastern sky, with Venus and Jupiter rising side by side to the west.

A steady southwest wind brought us to Gardiner’s Island the next day in company with Astra. We anchored, brought out the clam bait, rigged up, and proceeded to “bail” them at a rate of one porgy per minute for about 15 minutes until Kyle declared we’d caught our dinner with enough left over for porgy-loving friends. The wind increased in the afternoon and kept Leilani on her port rail back to Montauk.

Next day the fish were decapitated, cleaned, scaled, breaded with panko flour, and fried.

A happy star-spangled, moon-rising, southwest-wind-sailing, fish-catching, Fourth of July weekend. One to remember. 

Well here we are well into summer and the birds have successfully fledged many of their young. Will they go for a second brood? Piping plovers are one of those species that tries and tries again if it fails the first time around. When you think about it, it’s not so surprising. Think of the chicken. Mother hen sits in a nesting box and lays egg after egg, but if you don’t remove them, she reaches her clutch size and then incubates them. Chicken egg ranchers would go broke if the freshly laid eggs weren’t picked up each day.

You could try the same experiment in nature. If you removed the baby blue eggs from the robin’s nest in the yew outside your door each day, Mrs. Robin would continue to lay new ones, but not as many as 300 like some championship hens have done in the past. You would have to hand feed her to keep her laying.

Some rodent species — field mice, white-footed mice, etc. — have as many as three litters a year. The smaller the mammal, the more fecund. Small herbivorous mammals are prey for larger carnivorous mammals and birds. Consequently they have to produce more and more infants to stay even in the population race.

It’s the same in the seas as it is on land. The female oyster spawns thousands of eggs, hoping several will survive to maturity. The young start out as swimming larvae and are taken by a variety of filter feeders and zooplankters that feed on other zooplankters. The parents never know who their offspring are; there is no parental care involved.

Some fish spread their seed to the winds. However, a few do exhibit parental care. Take the male stickleback, which hides the just-born larvae in its mouth when attacked, or the seahorse — the female produces the eggs, but stuffs them in the male’s marsupium for safe keeping.

If you try to come up with a novel strategy for a species’ survival, one generation to the next, you will find that just about every unique idea has already been tried. Such is the nature of evolution over millions and millions of years.

The fewer the offspring in a parent’s lifetime, the larger the parent, generally. The human is somewhere in the middle. Some families have as manyas 15 siblings, but the norm is less than 5. In third world countries where infant mortality rates can be high, birth rates are also higher.

Mammals and birds differ from almost all reptiles and amphibians in that they exhibit parental care, mammals generally for a much longer time than birds. The larger the mammal or bird, the longer it takes to grow to sexual maturity. Sparrows are ready to reproduce a year after fledging. It may take three or four years before eagles come of age. The young of some mice have grown to sexual maturity and are fertile before they reach a year old. Most bovines, horses, and on up, take several years to reach sexual maturity.

The larger the mammal, the longer the period of child raising and parental care as well. There is a weaning process exhibited in mammals and birds. When I dropped out of college twice and was about to be drafted into the Army in 1957, my mother took me to the nearest recruiting office here on Long Island and I enlisted. I had no idea that I was being weaned and that, more important, it was to my advantage.

Some very well-protected or very well-hidden vertebrates have few offspring — the box turtle, which has almost no predators, save automobiles, lays less than 10 eggs in a clutch. The opposite is also true. Our red-backed salamander has a gray back on the South Fork and is soft and squishy. It lays as few as four eggs in a clutch. Its microhabitat, in and under rotting tree boles, may offer an explanation. Then there are those fabulous pelagic seabirds, the storm petrels, for example, that come to land to lay and hatch a single egg each year. Despite the very low reproductive rate, they seem to be holding their own.

The question often asked is, is it better to have fewer? Are the odds in favor of the only child making it big compared to any one of five or six siblings? I have yet to see the results of the research on that subject, but we all know about the Roosevelts and the Bachs. Sometimes more is better; sometimes less is best.

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

My son-in-law stood over the stove Monday evening stirring diced vegetables that would go into bass cakes along with a medley of spices, an egg as binder, and crackers crumbled by hand. The 40-pound striped bass providing the substance of the cakes was speared on Saturday by the same man stirring the veggies.

He talked about the Elbow, a place just about due east of the Montauk Lighthouse where a seamount rises to a depth of just 24 feet. The spot gathers fish, and the awe of surfers watching from shore as waves break on it during giant storm swells.

The chef said he saw a flotilla of porgies there on Saturday to match the flotilla of sport boats plying the rips off the Point — there was an unusually large number of boats working an unusually large body of fish — and he spoke of the danger posed by boaters who did not respect the red-with-white-stripe “diver-down” flags that indicate the presence of people underwater who might surface at any time.

We talked about the strong currents that rip and swirl around Montauk and Block Island Sound in general, how they can play navigational havoc while providing some of the best fishing found anywhere on the East Coast. The hunting strategies used by the various species in concert with currents would make for a fascinating film capturing tactics like how larger predators are able to hold their ground, so to speak, in the lee of rocks, waiting for the tide to sweep smaller fish within range.

The bass cakes, topped with the rich conversation about their source, went down just fine with a side of steamed green beans and papaya salad with goat cheese.

Currents, tides, and salad came to mind earlier in the day. I’ve written about the money tide before; I mean its existence and source, but the metaphor of it escaped me until Monday, I think because of the ongoing harangue over this summer’s surge of visitors and related frustrations.

For those unaware, July and August are the months when Gulf Stream eddies and meanders bring warm water and tropical species (there was a striped clownfish seeking the shade of my boat’s mooring buoy the other day).

It’s the warm water that draws visitors into the briny for a dip, often without remembering to remove the cash from their suits. The ocean floats it out of open pockets and mixes it with seaweed, usually the sweet-smelling red weed that’s combed from the bottom by strong currents this time of year.

The sea picks the pockets of swimmers, adding the lettuce of folded money to the salad of red weed and small flotsam driven by the prevailing southwest winds that move west-to-east close to shore. By the time it reaches Ditch Plain Beach, where the shoreline bends north and the bottom turns from sand to cobblestone, the salad gathers in heaps.

They are like shorebirds, the locals, who stalk the salad, wading knee-deep into it, eyes downcast watching the flowery kaleidoscope of undulating vegetation, as waves gently toss it, searching for fives, tens, and twenties.

The shorebirds have been known to pluck more than $100 from the money tide in a single day. Local people morphing into shorebirds and colluding with a warm sea to pick the pockets of summer visitors is a metaphor, right? Or, is it just me?

Glenn Grothmann, down at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk, informed me Tuesday morning that Jack Yee has died. Jack was a surfcaster-turned-photographer, a constant presence on the beach. He was a dedicated surfcaster who tusseled with local inshore net fishermen back in the day. No love lost there. More recently, he documented annual fishing tournaments. Many an angler owes to Jack Yee his or her glory shot, the one of them holding the big one.

He would have appreciated that big porgies are being taken by surfcasters right in downtown Montauk using worms and clams as bait, and he would have been down there on the docks when fishermen brought back the big bass they’ve been catching while drifting live eels around the aforementioned Elbow.

Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop on Montauk Highway in Amagansett, reminded me that Tuesday was “bass-teel” day with stripers being taken by surfcasters “upfront” around the Montauk Lighthouse, along the south-facing beaches from Montauk west. Grothmann agreed, saying that the larger bass were being taken on Darter lures at night.

A rumor is circulating that a caster at Georgica Beach in East Hampton had a 10-pound bluefish he was fighting bitten in half by . . . who knows, but sharks are fond of bluefish. In fact, a three-foot-long mako was caught from the beach the other day by a surfcaster lobbing bunker chunks. A few big rays were also caught along East Hampton beaches.

Bennett reported “snappers big time in Accabonac Harbor,” referring to the baby bluefish whose schooling not only adds prey to the area’s current glut of bait, but also serve as the traditional introductory catch for young anglers. Porgies are found all over Gardiner’s Bay, Bennett said, as well as fluke off Napeague.

’Tis the fishing tournament season, of course. On Saturday and Sunday, the annual Shark’s Eye no-kill shark tournament will be held from the Montauk Marine Basin. When caught, sharks are photographed and videoed by observers rather than gaffed, and this year, five will be outfitted with satellite tags. The tags allow the sharks to be followed on their migrations.

Speaking of a greener appreciation of the toothy neighbors we love to fear, Glenn Grothmann spun a yarn about a shark trip he took over the weekend. A big blue shark was hanging around in the slick. Lodged in its jaw, it had a long, heavy-duty, monofilament leader of the kind longline boats use attached to a hook. Grothmann said the shark ate bunker chunks thrown to it until it was practically eating out of the crew’s hands, but it would not take a baited hook. Finally, the shark came close enough for the crew to cut the leader off. The shark disappeared.

“It was like it wanted us to help,” Grothmann said.

I believe it.

Also this weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, the annual Grand-Slam tournament will be held from Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk. The tourney benefits the Montauk Friends of Erin and the East Hampton Kiwanis Club.

Each year, a veteran charter or party boat fishing captain is honored. This year, it’s Capt. Mike Vegessi, skipper of the popular Lazy Bones party boat. Anglers angle for striped bass, bluefish, fluke, and black sea bass. The state season for sea bass opened yesterday.