Shark tournaments are upon us. The captain’s meeting and beer bash for the Star Island Yacht Club’s 28th annual will take place this evening — entry fee, $1,000 per boat. The chum will flow Friday and Saturday, and sharks will be hoisted up the gibbet to be ogled, weighed, and necropsied.

Somewhere around $30,000 in prize money will be dispensed during the awards ceremony Saturday night, not counting the pool of much larger side bets. God help us.

I was thinking about God as the sloop Leilani approached the commercial dock with the rest of the Montauk fleet to receive the blessing of God’s earthly stewards on Sunday. We were under sail and so could not idle in line to pass close to the upheld hands of the clergy. Leilani liked the 10-knot wind blowing from the southwest. We passed perhaps 50 yards whence the blessings flowed and continued out the harbor inlet.

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him all creatures here below. Praise Him above ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.” The old doxology came to mind. Go figure. Google tells me that Thomas Ken penned the lines back in 1674. I must have repeated them thousands of times during my Episcopal school days. I wondered, was Leilani too distant to have received the blessings, or did they get a lift from the southwest wind? I choose to believe the latter.

Last summer, a nine-foot blue shark was caught during Montauk’s first ever no-kill contest, the Shark’s Eye tournament, in which fish were photographed, fitted with satellite tags for research purposes, and released. The nine-foot blue received a tag and was adopted by the kids at the Montauk School, who were able to track the shark’s movements via their computers. They named the shark Beamer, as in “Beam me up, Scotty.” The tournament and festival were held from the Montauk Marine Basin, and will be again from July 11 through July 13. The entry fee per boat is $950.

Alas, Beamer was caught by a longline market fisherman off the coast of Costa Rica in May, but not before earlier calling on Rincon, Puerto Rico, a village well known to Montauk surfers and their families. The point is, a shark caught off our shores during a tournament lived another year, maybe reproduced, and taught a great number of people about its movements. During tournament season, some view God’s creatures as a blessing, others as a potential jackpot. I happen to believe that the sea is not a casino.

And, speaking of beliefs, Allan Weisbecker, author of “Cosmic Banditos,” “In Search of Captain Zero,” and “Can’t You Get Along With Anyone?” is a surfer and self-confessed “doubter” as in, he doesn’t believe we went to the moon, 9/11 was an inside job, the Internet is “black magic,” etc.

He has purchased a land yacht and will soon depart Montauk on his third, “and maybe final” pilgrimage to nowhere in particular in the company of his new dog, Gus. Gone before are Shiner, the dog who offered unconditional support during the writing of “Captain Zero,” and Honey, who did the same during the shooting of his new film, “Water Time: Surf Travel Diary of a MadMan.” He will be blogging en route.

The world premier of “Water Time” will be held at Rick’s Crabby Cowboy Cafe on Saturday, 9 a.m., no admission. The film is not a surf movie per se. Rather it’s a visually and mentally stimulating memoir of a surfing doubting-Thomas who has chosen to go through life poking his finger in history’s wounds to see if they’re real, to see who flinches. There is sure to be some flinching on Saturday night for sure.

Speaking of surfing and the grid, Montauk’s Nick Joeckel, Justin Burkle, and Travis Beckman are scheduled to return today from an off-the-grid surfari to Nicaragua. They scored great waves documented photographically by Joeckel. We look forward to the pics.

Cherry Harbor, on the west side of Gardiner’s Island, is a peaceful place. It’s where H.M.S. Culloden anchored out of the winter winds during the Revolution before taking off after French blockade runners during a winter storm. The result was the wreck of the Culloden on the eastern point of Fort Pond Bay in Montauk.

On Sunday, the Viking Starship party boat anchored up near where Culloden set sail on her ill-fated chase. According to the Starship’s log, her anglers experienced “the best bite yet in the sweet waters of Cherry Harbor. Before we anchored up we had porgies on and it hasn’t stopped. Jumbos started chewing after the tide changed and coolers were stuffed to the limits.” A man named Carlos Moreno of Corona won the pool with a 3.1-pound porgy, which he probably considered both a jackpot and a blessing.

The cosmos is expanding at an accelerated rate. There are thousands of meteorites ranging in size from a hardball to an aircraft carrier in crazy orbits and asymmetric paths in our solar system; small ones hit the earth annually. A big one like the one that smacked down in the center of Russia last year could hit somewhere in America within the next 10 years. The earth is pockmarked with craters from the strikes of asteroids and meteorites, as is the moon.

The universe is filled with uncertainty. Our solar system is filled with uncertainty. Earth itself is filled with uncertainty. What will be the next natural disaster to visit us? Tornado, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, meteorite strike, volcanic eruption? You name it. Closer to home, here on Long Island it’s only a matter of time before something as big or bigger than Sandy will hit us, and no matter how well we think we are prepared, there will be hell to pay.

Not only are there myriad short-term disaster possibilities out there, there also some long-term ones afoot. They do more damage than the one-day and two-day ones, but they do it in slo mo, so you don’t perceive its happening.

Take the rising sea level, for example. It’s rising at a snail’s pace so you can’t see the inkling of a change day to day, week to week, month to month, or even year to year. But the seas are rising, at least on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Rising sea level is our biggest fear in the long run.

Take a shallow embayment like Accabonac Harbor. The four roads that bound it, Gerard Drive, Fireplace Road, Old Stone Highway, and Louse Point Road, are never more than two feet above present-day sea level throughout their lengths, and only about a foot or so above sea level for half their lengths. The one-to-two-foot rise of marine waters postulated for the turn of the century will triple the size of the harbor. The sea water will stretch from road to road in whichever direction you choose to look. What are now lawns and gardens will become salt marsh or a continuous sward of phragmites. Basements will be filled with water; private wells will pump brackish water that will be undrinkable.

Lake Montauk’s shores, too, offer little relief to overriding seas, especially on the west and south sides where the terrain is low and only slightly above sea level. All of Ditch Plain will be under water. On the west side the lake’s waters will stretch to the Montauk Downs golf course. Star Island will be completely under water.

The residences and businesses along both sides of Fort Pond in Montauk will fare better, but beware the ones on the north and south side. Fort Pond will ultimately become part of Fort Pond Bay on the north and the Atlantic on the south. Downtown Montauk will be entirely cut off by water. Montauk Highway will require a bridge to cross it. One can see it happening today by driving, biking, or walking along Second House Road to where it meets Industrial Road on the north.

The next time you are there, take a look at “Brushy Island” standing a couple of hundred feet off the shore. When I started working for East Hampton Town, there were trees and shrubs on it, one could walk on it, it was firm. When Norman Taylor botanized Montauk in the early 1920s, he found the only American basswood in Montauk at that time growing on the island. The basswood is not a wetland tree; it grows on upland soils! Ninety years later, the woody vegetation on the island is half-submerged, the tupelo trees are all dead, Brushy Island is now called Turtle Island by the locals and has become a prime roosting area for double-crested cormorants.

What about that marvelous piece of land, the Napeague stretch? Napeague Bay will eventually reach the ocean, not just after a superstorm like Sandy, but permanently. Except for the dunes along the south side, the rest of the land is barely above sea level. The state highway is higher than the land on both sides, yet it is only a few feet above sea level. Half of the pitch pine forest that flanks the north and south sides of the road on the western part of the isthmus is close to sea level. It will be under water by 2050. Again, unless the road is considerably elevated, say as the Long Island Rail Road to the north, one will need a mile-long bridge — a causeway? — to get from downtown Amagansett to Montauk by car.

In the Village of East Hampton, Hook Pond will reach from the ocean shore to the Long Island Rail Road. Town Pond will begin at the flagpole between James Lane and Main Streets and extend southward along Ocean Avenue. A hundred years ago it was only a swamp!

Three Mile Harbor on Gardiner’s Bay is high along its west and east sides, but the land immediately south of the southernmost marina and the trianglular wedge of land through which Tan Bark Creek runs on its way to the harbor and that father south to beyond the Springy Banks Road junction will become regularly lapped by the harbor.

And there will be no need for the East Hampton Trustees to biannually let Georgica Pond out of its cage. It will become a permanent arm of the ocean and that arm will eventually reach well to the north of the rest area on Route 27.

It’s not a cozy, dry scenario in store for East Hampton, but a very wet one, indeed. If you are thinking of moving to Southampton Town or, perhaps, to the North Fork, you will find that half of those two areas will be under water or, at the very least, subject to frequent tidal flooding. During the latter part of the century, south of the highway will be moving to north of the highway. It will be a completely different world, but most likely still very crowded in the summertime.

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

When pressed during an afternoon sail aboard the sloop Leilani on Monday, Dr. David Nelson allowed that before slipping into semiretirement two months ago he’d helped restore vision to 15,000 eyes, give or take, over the course of his 40-year career as an ophthalmic surgeon. What those eyes might have missed!

Earlier in the day, he’d peddled his bike from Montauk to East Hampton and back, then paddled out for a short surf session in shapely, waist-high waves at Ditch Plain not far from his house. The doctor complained of knee pain, and why not?

The previous evening, Nelson had a few friends over for a dinner of bluefish and striped bass he’d smoked in his fancy, stainless-steel smoker using a brine of his own design. The fish were a gift from David Schleifer, N.Y.F.D. retired, and a Ditch Plain neighbor. The meal had an anatomy worthy of Anthony Bourdain.

A few days prior, Schleifer’s sharp eyes espied some nervous water just off the Ditch Plain jetty. He cast into it with a lure known as a Deadly Dick and came up with a large bluefish. Sensing there was more to the story, most likely a few striped bass prowling for scraps below whatever the big blues were feeding on, he performed a quick surgery on his catch and found, in the gut, the head of what he thought was a bunker.

He ran home to fetch his bait-casting rod, baited its hook with the “bunker” head and within seconds had a 35-pound striped bass, the very same bass (and bluefish) that provided the meat that Dr. Nelson smoked and later served along with a horseradish sauce, lively conversation, and an excellent Sancerre.

Ah, but it turns out the fish that set the meal in motion was probably not an oily bunker, but rather a herring with sweeter meat — a shad. Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported “shad all over the beach in East Hampton, Main Beach west. Big blues on them all over the place.”

Bennett also passed the word that nice keeper bass up to 20 pounds were being caught off White Sands on Napeague and at Georgica Beach in East Hampton as well. He said there were “very big” porgies in Cherry Harbor within sight of the proud old windmill on Gardiner’s Island. He added that three-to-four-pound fluke were being taken off the Clearwater section of Springs “over near Three Mile Harbor.” He said that bluefish were within casting distance from the banks of the Accabonac Harbor inlet, and blowfish within range of Three Mile Harbor’s Gann Road dock.

Bennett found proof that weakfish were feeding in Gardiner’s Bay when Oliver Saul, a light-tackle angler he was guiding aboard his charter boat Moon Pie on Sunday morning, caught a beauty using a small bucktail lure. Under his tutelage, his clients later turned the weak into “frigets,” my secret recipe for beer-battered, deep-fried weakfish. The complete recipe is in Mark Mills’s book, “Amagansett.”

A 377-pound thresher was the largest shark brought aboard the Reel Deal during last weekend’s tournament held from the Star Island Yacht Club in Montauk. A blue shark that weighed 250 pounds and a mako that tipped the scales at 281 pounds took top honors in their respective divisions. The blue was angled from the Helena, the mako from the Alyssa Ann. Two other threshers over 300 pounds were caught over the course of the tournament’s two days of competition.

We are on the verge of the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. For those living on the equator, it’s just another day. For those on the tiny island of Spitzbergen in the Arctic Ocean off the northernmost coast of Norway, there will only be day, no night.

Before life on earth began percolating some three to four billion years ago, the earth had been revolving around the sun in an orbit very much like its present one, and it took on the order of 365 days to make the journey. Its orbit accounts for those living in the southern hemisphere having their winter and shortest days in May through August, just the opposite of what we in the northern hemisphere experience each year.

The daily spin on its axis and yearly trip around the sun has been incorporated into the genomes of just about every plant and animal, as well as the most primitive free-living beings, the blue-green algae and the like. We all have circadian rhythms. Even single-celled organisms or cells isolated from multicellular organisms raised in isolation from their mates exhibit circadian rhythms.

Almost all wild flora and fauna live today as they did thousands of years ago according to their respective circadian rhythms. Even animals such as the axolotl salamander and the cave mole, which live in complete darkness, have daily rhythms that are the same from generation to generation. Humans and their pets are different. In the old days there were no night jobs. One slept in the dark and worked during the day. These days there are three different shifts, day, swing, and night. The city and, one might also say, the country, never sleeps. We have all-night convenience stores, 24-hour radio and TV media, different means of nighttime transportation, and the like.

Even so, humans are not so different from those animals that live by day and rest by night or vice versa. We tend to live beyond our innate circadian rhythms, which are established early in the womb. We play havoc with our rhythms and end up paying the price. We take more and more drugs, more and more medicines. Living the old way is considered boring, especially here in the Hamptons, when the long days, long nights, and freely circulating alcohol and money begs us to live it up.

It is no fluke of evolution or God’s work, whichever way you care to look at it, that all of nature in the northern hemisphere is most active in the spring, building up to a crescendo which asymptotes around the time of the summer solstice. By now most of the bird species that stayed the winter or arrived earlier from the south have hatched and fledged young. Their inherent circadian rhythms have them changing from singing, defending territories, and sitting on eggs to looking after those departed from the nests, teaching them and weaning them, as it were.

The same is true near the Arctic Circle, where maximum productivity in terms of food, reproduction, and energy expenditure has reached a turning point. The rest of the summer leads to fattening and preparing for the trip back south.

Frogs and salamanders have mostly finished breeding except for those that are completely monsoon-dependent such as the spadefoot toads and Fowler’s toads. All of the insectivorous species — the fishes, amphibians, birds, bats, dragonflies, and a few others — have been busy gleaning insects from the swarms that build to a maximum at about this time. The fructivorous species are waiting in the wings for the blueberries, blackberries, and the like, while the nut eaters will have to content themselves with foliage, insects, plants, and berries until the acorns, walnuts, hickory nuts, holly berries, and juniper berries come along in the fall.

All nature has circadian rhythms. In vertebrates, these rhythms are chiefly regulated by a gland derived from optic tissue, no bigger than a pea situated in the very middle of the brain. In a few primitive vertebrates like the tuatara lizard and the lamprey, this gland, the pineal gland, still receives light and thus has given rise to the notion of a third eye. This gland has several different cells that contribute to the production of melatonin, a hormone that is produced in the dark, but inhibited by light.

Popularly, today, many adults take synthetic melatonin to help them sleep at night. All vertebrates produce melatonin to keep them rested between exertions such as the 16-hour periods of activity that birds at this latitude experience in May, June, and July. It’s sad, but true, that here on Long Island nature’s crescendo has just about reached its zenith. From now on until the arrival of the winter solstice, everything will be running downhill.

Melatonin production will increase as the nights gradually lengthen. Most of us humans will always try to make the summer seem longer than it is. We’ll continue to live it up right on into the fall, but then school comes and the wellbeing of the kids should always come first. I hesitate to think what would happen to mankind, already in serious trouble, if that little twerp of a gland, the smallest but perhaps the most important of all, were to suddenly dry up and lose its oomph. “Too sleep, perchance to dream.”

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

“There’s something going on in the ocean,” Chuck Weimar said as he strode along its shoreline on Sunday. Naturally, something always is, but to hear it from the veteran fisherman, captain of the Montauk dragger Rianda S, meant the “something” could be abnormal.

Pointing to a mound of it along the shore at Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk, he said he was seeing an inordinate amount of seaweed in the offshore water column. Net fishermen had been plagued with it for the past month or more, huge swaths of dead mega algae the likes of which Weimar said he had never seen — a disturbing trend, and something to watch.

Equally disturbing to some, yea a plague, is the greatly increased population of seals feasting away on fish that people like to catch in Gardiner’s Bay.

Ken Rafferty, a light-spin-tackle and fly-fishing guide, reported: “On Sunday, we went to Gardiner’s Island, Old Silas, Great Gull, and Little Gull Islands. We must have seen 100 gray seals. I’m sure they’re not helping the fishing. I’m hoping when the water warms up they will leave, but I doubt it.”

Rafferty said the fishing had slowed markedly from the action during the last two weeks in May, when 15-pound bluefish were “finning everywhere, with nice-sized stripers every day, but then the bottom dropped out. Now it’s hit or miss. Some days I put on nearly 50 miles searching Little Peconic all the way to Napeague and don’t find a fish.” Rafferty said he had no trouble finding small schoolie striped bass in Three Mile Harbor, “but most of our anglers like getting out into the bay.”

Hard to say if seals are to blame, but fishermen and marine scientists have been marking the surge in the local seal population over the past decade. Species, including gray seals, that historically inhabited more northern waters have descended on southern New England and the islands and shores of the eastern Peconic Estuary.

Not to be an alarmist, but in other parts of the world — South Africa, Northern California, Hawaii — large seal populations draw jaws, big ones. The beaches of Cape Cod were closed to swimmers and surfers last summer due to cruising white sharks. Their numbers are increasing in light of their protected status, a good thing for keeping Nature’s balance, but troubling to surfers who are now part of the balance by virtue of their own increased numbers.

Some see imbalance, to the detriment of sharks, during this the season of shark tournaments. The second hoist-’em-onto-the-scales contest of the year will be held from the Montauk Marine Basin tomorrow and Saturday. But then again, on July 12 and 13, the Marine Basin will host the second annual Shark’s Eye no-kill tournament and festival. This is a catch-and-release tournament that prov­ed to be extremely popular last year. Several sharks were fitted with satellite tags before being released. The tags allowed their movements to be followed online for months.

Jimmy Buffett entered his Last Mango boat last time around. Organizers say he will be back this year. They hope his participation will inspire other captains to join in. About 20 boats are needed to accommodate the catch-and-release anglers, camera crews, and tournament observers.

And, speaking of seals, sharks, and surfers, Montaukers Travis Beckmann, Nick Joeckel, Leif Engstrom, and Justin Burkle, are back home from their surfari to northwestern Nicaragua. They caught a great swell documented by Burkle.

His photos will be on display along with the photos and art of Nate Best, Ian Cooke, Jesse Joeckle, James Katsipis, Grant Monahan, Joseph Ohaire, Scott Pitches, Dalton Portella, and Bartholomew Schwarz at the Atlantic Terrace hotel in Montauk on Saturday from 6 p.m. on.

Allan Weisbecker has slipped his moorings. Montauk’s surfing author and filmmaker hit the road yesterday with his dog, Gus, in a new “land yacht” R.V., first stop Connecticut where he plans to meet with “people who don’t think I’m crazy.” These would be “doubters” like himself who believe that things, including the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, 9/11, and the moon landing, were not what the government and a controlled media want us to believe. He spelled this out in his film, seven years in the making, “Water Time: Surf Travel Diary of a MadMan.” The film premiered at the Crabby Cowboy Cafe last week. He took issue with my quoting him in my last column saying the Internet, which contains his website, was “black magic.” “I believe in unarguable facts, not black magic.”

He said he planned to argue his points and document the responses of people he meets along the way.

Weisbecker’s “travels with Charlie from hell” up through Nova Scotia then west to either Alaska or Mexico depending on the weather, can be tracked, like a shark wearing a satellite tag, via his website, Banditobooks.com, where a link to a free viewing of his movie can be found along with his new blog. His parting words: “There are a lot of people out there who believe we’re living more or less in a matrix.”

If you want out of the matrix, best to sail out. Emily Havlik of Sail Montauk has announced the start of the organization’s evening regattas held each Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. from the Montauk Yacht Club on Star Island. Sail Montauk offers private charters, lessons, and sunset sails. You can find it on Facebook.

On the evening of June the 11 I drove 43 miles on the back roads in Southampton Town listening for the breeding calls of whippoorwills and chuck-will’s-widows. I’ve been living in Noyac for 35 years and discovered a paved road right down the block that I had never been on, Old Sag Harbor Road, which connects Brick Kiln with Millstone Road where the old Bridgehampton Racetrack was situated.

A more rural road one would be hard pressed to find, just fields, trees, and a couple of houses. I did come across a noisy rookery of fish crows in the fading light, but not a single goatsucker did I detect. And so went the rest of that night: 31 stops not a single whippoorwill or chuck-will’s-widow. Aside from the crows, I heard green frogs and bullfrogs and saw several fireflies. Maybe it was the on-again-off-again full moon, the many motor vehicle motor hums or a stiff breeze that blew on and off. Disappointment reigned!

Last Sunday night conditions were perfect. There was not a wisp of wind. It was semibright. I finished Southampton’s western roads — Sagaponack Road, Merchant’s Path, Widow Gavitts, and the like — and started on East Hampton’s roads through the Northwest Woods and Wainscott’s pine barrens. Eleven times I stopped and listened here and there as far away from houses and their lights as possible, but again, not a single whip or chuck utterance. Because it was still, the rattlings of the helicopters coming and going from East Hampton Airport drowned out most of the other sounds. There were numerous autos, some of those speeding by as if engaged in a race. I did encounter 8 deer, 2 raccoons, and as many as 10 fireflies, which helped me get through the search.

On the following Monday night I covered the rest of East Hampton Town, halfway into Montauk. Except for passing motor vehicles, wooded roads that as recently as 15 years ago would reveal several calling whips and chucks produced only silence. Barcelona, which had at least one pair of whippoorwills calling last year, was silent. The Grace Estate, which in the past had several pairs of whippoorwills calling, was also silent. The west overlook on the north side of Montauk State Parkway, which produced a singing whippoorwill last year at this time, was silent, too. Napeague Harbor Road along which a chuck-will’s-widow sang repeatedly during last year’s outing, was also silent.

I covered 65 miles of back roads between 8:30 and midnight without hearing so much as a single whip or chuck. On the other hand, I saw 8 more deer, and 2 more raccoons, and was flashed by more than 30 fireflies. These last were especially abundant at the edge of Quail Hill Farm in Amagansett and over a swale at the edge of Alewife Brook Road in Northwest.

At a stop along Phoebe Scoy Road in Northwest at dusk, a wood thrush sang repeatedly. A little later the same Ale­wife Brook Road swale resounded with one of the loudest and most thrilling choruses of gray tree frogs that I’ve ever experienced. At two stops, green frogs were singing. Thus I had no problem hearing night sounds, but not a single one was coming from a whippoorwill or chuck-will’s-widow.

Yes, it is very disappointing that there are even fewer of these two wonderful crepuscular species around this year than last. Apparently, they are going the way of ruffed grouse, bobwhite and other ground-nesting birds of which there were many hereabouts in the last century. But even if I didn’t hear a single bird or frog call, or see a firefly light up, there is something magical about witnessing the night tree canopies against a starlit sky. At every stop I appreciated how still the South Fork’s outback can be at night. It was if I was alone in some vast forest, completely apart from the hustle and bustle that dominates the summer daylight hours here.

The air was also delightfully fresh and redolent. Thus, I couldn’t resist smelling a few of those new PSEG poles that uglify the designated local scenic area that the farm fields along Town Lane in Amagansett represent. They stink now just as much as they did two months ago. That pentachlorophenol, or penta, that saturates them and the soil at their base is wicked stuff. These same reeking poles line two sides of Quail Hill Farm. I noticed that the fireflies were concentrating on the two sides absent of them. Some insects are smarter than some humans!

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

The Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation freed an 800-pound leatherback sea turtle on Sunday that had gotten entangled in a lobster trap line in the ocean about a mile offshore.    

Foundation biologists and gear were alerted at about 5 p.m. to the turtle’s predicament by the Montauk Coast Guard Station, which provided a boat and crew to get them to the site. Keeping tabs on the turtle’s location could have been problematic, Robert A. DiGiovanni Jr., the foundation’s executive director and senior biologist, said. “A turtle is a different kind of animal to have entangled. A seal goes in and out of the water, while a turtle usually is not in and out.”

Foundation personnel “assessed the level of entanglement and then freed the animal by unwrapping and cutting the lobster trap,” Dr. DiGiovanni said. Based on its weight and length, which was about five feet, Dr. DiGiovanni said it was not likely to be young. Its gender could not be determined. The team stayed nearby for about a half-hour to be sure the turtle didn’t resurface with further problems.

The Coast Guard crew who helped in the rescue named the turtle Oriskany after a United States aircraft carrier that was sunk in 2006 and is now an artifical reef.

Dr. DiGiovanni said that leather­backs, which are the largest sea turtles, are somewhat common in local waters at this time of year. Last year, two leatherbacks were identified in Gardiner’s Bay in the same week. He asked the public’s cooperation in reporting any they see. The foundation’s 24-hour hotline is 369-9829.

The foundation, which works with other marine animals as well, recently received calls about dolphins at Shinnecock. Another dolphin, elsewhere in Southampton, was distressed and did not make it. The foundation regularly releases rehabilitated seals; the next such event will take place on July 5 during a Coast Guard and Guard Auxiliary open house in Hampton Bays.

“This year we have five satellite tags.” Carl Darenberg, owner of the Montauk Marine Basin, said casually on Monday, with every expectation that I would understand what he was saying. How strange. The “satellite-tag” sentence speaks to our time, late June 2014, and this place, Montauk. Imagine explaining its meaning to someone prior to Oct. 4, 1957, the day the Soviet Union put the first satellite into space.

In these parts, the accomplishment was memorialized by baymen, who named the slimy seaweed of mysterious origin plaguing the bay at the time “sputnik grass.”

So it’s Oct. 3, 1957, the weed has not been named, and you’re on your boat cutting clam strips for bait and explaining to your friend that in the not-to-distant future people would be fishing for sharks for fun and prize money.

“What the hell for?” he would ask, the concept of shark fishing, being pioneered at the time by Capt. Frank Mundus of Montauk, as foreign as what came next.

“Yes, and sharks will become a universal bugbear due to a movie called ‘Jaws,’ directed by a part-time resident of East Hampton. Very scary.”

“You’re nuts.”

“So then, after years of faux big-game fishing — sharks being the easiest fish in the sea to hook, and the toothiest to photograph hanging upside down beside right-side-up braggarts — people will decide to hook sharks, fight them to the boat, and attach small transmitters to their backs. The sharks will be released. The transmitters will emit a signal that bounces off a receiver that circles the Earth several miles up in outer space. The beam will then be directed back to Earth. In this way, using special TV sets that think, folks will be able to watch the sharks as they travel about on their migrations.”

“Take me back to the dock. You’re scaring me.”

The second annual no-kill, Shark’s Eye tournament will be held from the Marine Basin July 12 and 13, and, as Darenberg said, five of the sharks caught will be outfitted with satellite tags. It should be an exciting event. Sharks caught during an old-fashioned shark tournament held from the Marine Basin last weekend included a 355-pound thresher, and two makos over 300 pounds.

Meanwhile, surfcasters are finding 20-pound striped bass in the suds along the ocean side of the Napeague stretch using tossed diamond jigs and bucktails in the a.m. and clam baits later in the day. Bass are also being taken from the surf at Georgica Beach in East Hampton.

Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports excellent porgy fishing in Gardiner’s Bay with some of the silvery pink scup topping four pounds. Bennett recommends cooking them in olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper, and saving one or two for sandwich meat the next day.

“Cocktail”-size bluefish are being caught off the mouth of Three Mile Harbor. Why cocktail? Perhaps someone decided that yearling bluefish in the two-to-five-pound range went well with martinis.

Because critters that show up off Cape Cod usually show up around here, keep your eyes peeled for an Atlantic torpedo or two. The species is also known as the dark electric ray and can grow six feet long and up to 200 pounds. Young ones feed in shallow water and should not be toyed with. Torpedos can generate 200 volts of electricity to stun their prey. How ’bout a catch-and-very-carefully-release Atlantic torpedo tournament?

A reminder: All recreational anglers must register with the state as part of a federal effort to keep track of landings for management purposes. Anglers 16 and older can register online at the New York State License Center website, or by phone at 866-933-2257. They must register each year. Anglers found without a registration may be ticketed by Big Brother, up to $250 per violation.

Terry Sullivan is one fisherman who has been around. He fishes the ocean, bays, harbors, tidal creeks, ponds, and trout streams such as the Nissequogue. He’s caught just about every fish that will hit a lure or a fly from a shore at one of the above. He’s seen just about everything fishwise on Long Island, but last Thursday morning he was a bit flabbergasted to find a fish that he never caught here and, maybe, one that he never saw here. And it was a very big fish indeed, one very hard to overlook as it was only a few feet from the edge of the Ocean Avenue parking lot next to the western bubble of Hook Pond in East Hampton Village.

It wasn’t just one fish, but several fish, all in the 10-pound and bigger range. He called me at home and described the scene and I immediately knew the fish that he was watching and photographing: It had to be a carp. The carp is a very large minnow that derives from Eurasia but it’s been here 175 years or so already and is so widespread through the Americas that it is considered naturalized, in the same way that the mute swan or tree-of-heaven is naturalized.

There are several carp species, all from Eurasia, that have been imported — the herbivorous grass carp, the koi carp, a variety of goldfish, and that one presently taking over the freshwaters of the Midwest and about to enter the Great Lakes, the silver carp. Its means of escaping from would-be predators is leaping out of water several feet into the air. When a motorboat passes through a bunch they all start jumping madly. The motorboat is likely to be the landing spot for a few, and the boaters have to be on the lookout because if a big one hits you, it can knock you into the water and give you a big lump on the head.

Goldfish and carp have been aquacultured in China and other parts of Asia since the birth of Christ. Except for the goldfish, which is found in every state in the union, but which does not do well in natural ponds and lakes, the common carp is the next most abundant member of the carp group here. You might raise a common carp in a bathtub, but you don’t raise one in a goldfish bowl because the common carp can attain a weight of nearly 90 pounds and a length of three feet in a lifetime lasting up to 25 years.

I know carp well because as a boy in Mattituck I used to catch them in Wolf Pit Pond a few hundred yards down the road from my house in the Oregon section of the hamlet. Wolf Pit Pond had two species of fish, eels which got there by way of Mattituck Creek a few hundred feet from the pond, and carp, which someone put there a long time ago. The Wolf Pit ones were less than a foot long, they were “stunted” as they say in fishery lingo.

I tried several baits before I hit upon the standard one, the red earthworm, or “night crawler”: tightly rolled dough balls made of wetted Wonder Bread, the bread that helped “build my body eight ways” as the baker proclaimed, but the carp would suck them off the hook rather than bite them off. Worms worked.

Carp are a favorite food fish in many parts of Eurasia including the British Isles, where they were imported early on. Isaac Walton, the dean of freshwater sports fishermen, described catching them in British ponds and lakes and preparing them to eat in the middle 1600s. But carp are very oily. I took a few of the Wolf Pitters home and my mother cooked them up. They were very oily and made me sick. That was the end of carp eating but not of carp fishing.

Carp got very big in Maratooka Lake, a kettlehole lake a little larger than Hook Pond, just south of Mattituck High School. A relative, Tommy Reeve, once speared a 37-pounder there. Carp come close to shore when breeding, beginning in late spring after the water warms up. Two or three males pursue a female and nudge her with their noses and other body parts to get her to sow her eggs, as many as 30,000 in a couple of hours or so. Thus, most of the time the eggs, which adhere to bits of vegetation in the shallows, are fertilized by more than one father, a type of crossbreeding that several other fish species practice, including salmons, anchovies, and shad.

Carp are distinguished from almost all other fish by the presence of Weberian ossicles, modified vertebrae that attach the gas bladder to the carp’s inner ear, the “labyrinth.” Apparently, these ossicles work like the three bones in our middle ear: They amplify sound waves picked up by the gas bladder, which is especially important in hearing underwater. Carp are known to have very strong auditory perception.

There is a downside to the common carp. It likes to grub in the bottom, silting up the water, and its feces break down quickly — bits of fertilizer that eutrophy the water column. However, the carp does very well in most of America’s freshwaters and is not likely to be removed. Since it doesn’t take artificial lures, it is not a popular angling fish, but is becoming more so with each passing generation. And, like the koi, it is a frequent item on the osprey’s menu, especially when the osprey pair is feeding their perpetually hungry young.

The milling around/head butting method of reproduction Terry experienced will shortly be happening in Georgica Pond, Sagg Pond, Fort Pond, Mill Pond, and a host of other ponds on the South Fork. Despite the concerns, it looks like the common carp is here to stay. Interestingly, it has become rather rare, even endangered, in parts of its native Eurasia, not unlike Eurasian phragmites, which is thriving here but not doing well back home. The common carp may not be as American as apple pie, but it’s a fixture here. Then again, didn’t American apple pie start out in Europe?

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

Life: The symphony of birds, thousands of them greeted the sun on Monday morning. Surfers, hundreds of them, awoke to paddle into a surprise east swell that arrived during the night with an offshore wind to sculpt near-perfect waves. Surfcasters greeted the news that big, very big striped bass were caught from the rocks in Montauk’s moorland coves during the night. At Lazy Point, the naming of the same night’s stars and constellations via a stargazer app on a friend’s iPhone was accompanied by a hilarious, wine-spiced prattle regarding Albert’s theory of space-time as the essence of mahimahi wafted from the grill.

This East End, early-summer cornucopia of gifts flowed forth on the first day of the month against the backdrop, the blackdrop of a young Montauker’s untimely death. The shock of it hung in the minds of our close-knit community as we mourned surrounded by the beauty of what should have been.

The stripers were indeed large, perhaps the same body of fish witnessed around North Haven’s South Ferry slip last week. The action took place during the early morning hours of May 31 into June 1. Matt McDermott’s bass was the biggest at 54.12 pounds. Frank LaSalle’s weighed in at 48.52 pounds. Ben McCarron reeled in a 43.8-pounder, and Walter Clymer’s bass that most years would have seemed a spring giant weighed 36.7 pounds.

McDermott’s bass put him in the lead of the Montauk SurfMaster’s spring tournament. The school of big fish may not stick around for long. It’s about time for the larger body of smaller striped bass to appear, first in Gardiner’s Bay outside Accabonac Harbor, Devon, Gardiner’s Island, and along Napeague. A fly fisherman was seen poling along in the shallows at the south end of Lake Montauk on Sunday, a good place to sight-cast for nearly arrived stripers.

On May 26, Gary (Toad) Stephens ventured south of Montauk to find a fluke in the “doormat” class at 8.4 pounds. He’s now the king of the hill in the season-long fluke tournament. The fluke take continues apace, helped along by the new, five-fish bag limit and 18-inch minimum size.

Not all the good fishing took place in the brine. Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, reported very large walleye up to seven pounds were being caught in Montauk’s Fort Pond. Earthworms were doing the trick. Next time you’re in his shop, ask him about the times he sat on the porch of his old shop at Skimhampton with Elizabeth Taylor. He says they talked worms of all kinds, baits she apparently preferred.

Gardiner’s Bay also holds fluke and porgies, especially around Accabonac Harbor. In East Hampton, the ocean around the Georgica jetties is yielding striped bass. According to Bennett, weakfish are being caught in Northwest Harbor. He’s looking for help in his shop, preferably someone who speaks Spanish as well as Ingles.

Early warning: The world premiere of Allan Weisbecker’s “Water Time: Surf Travel Diary of a Madman,” will take place at the Crabby Cowboy in Montauk on Saturday, June 14, at 9 p.m.