Sailing Classes

    The first of the East Hampton Town Recreation Department’s summer series of two-week sailing sessions is to begin Monday at the south end of Lake Montauk. Preregistration at the Parks and Recreation Department, behind Town Hall, is required. The morning and afternoon sessions are limited to 15 students. The minimum age is 12. The fee is $200 per person.

Riding Scholarships

    The Stony Hill Foundation, which is to offer riding scholarships to South Fork children interested in taking up equestrian sports, will hold a benefit cocktail party, at which there will be a dressage exhibition and a pony drill team performance, from 6 to 8 p.m. on June 30 at Stony Hill Stables, Town Lane, Amagansett. Tickets, which are tax-deductible, cost $125 per person and $200 for a couple.

June 4, 1987

    The old men beat the young ones, and also the 90-degree heat in Saturday’s 5K Race Against Drug Abuse in Sag Harbor. Ted Haiman, 44, a part-time Amagansett resident who holds the masters record of 4 minutes and 22 seconds in the Fifth Avenue Mile, was the winner in 16:23.

    “I wanted to relax in a low-key race,” Haiman said afterward, “but then I saw Cliff Clark and Kevin Barry. . . . But, on the other hand, that legitimized the race for me.”

    . . . He came close to making a couple of wrong turns on the final leg down Route 114. “Once,” said Haiman, “I almost ran into a driveway, and another time, as I was about to make a turn, I heard somebody from a car scream, ‘No! No!’ ”

    Bunny O’Brien of Water Mill, the race director, was probably that person. “He was running so fast,” she said, “and right down the middle of 114. We couldn’t get him to go over on the shoulder. He was in his own world, I guess.”

    . . . It was the first time that Clark, whose own Shelter Island 10K will be run Saturday, has been beaten by a fellow masters (over-40) runner. “I didn’t want to see him now,” said Clark. “Maybe in four to six weeks.”

    Haiman is second-seeded in Shelter Island’s masters field.

    A cacophony of children, whose number was estimated at about 200, converged on Sag Harbor’s Mashashimuet Park Saturday morning where the avid contestants successively ran, biked, and wriggled over a balloon-festooned mini triathlon course with maximum enjoyment and minimum incident.

    Duane Bock, an East Hampton High School senior, was the runner-up to Westhampton’s Brian Soldon in the Suffolk County golf tournament played May 27 at the Rock Hill Golf and Country Club in Manorville.

    Soldon, Bock, and eight other Suffolk qualifiers will play in the New York State championships at Cornell University this weekend.

    The big news in the East Hampton Town men’s slow-pitch softball league this week was the ouster of the “strike mat,” a means by which ball-and-strike calls were rendered virtually automatic. Last Thursday, following a two-week trial period, the league’s managers decided by an 11-1 vote to throw the mat out, thus putting the ball-and-strike calls back in the hands of the umpires.

    . . . The mat, which was the width of home plate and fit snugly behind it, resulted in flatter and more grooved pitches. The league’s hurlers, with a few exceptions, found the small mat hard to hit with a high-arc ball, and, as a consequence, many more walks were issued than in the past, and playing times were extended to well over two hours.

    Paul Annacone, the East Hampton touring tennis professional, lost in the second round of the French Open on Friday to Mats Wilander, the fourth seed, 6-3, 6-4, 4-6, 6-4.

    Hans Finne, the first mate on the dragger Atlantis, which towed for fluke on Friday, said that fishing for one species was rare today, but common in the past. “You used to find a spot and fish. . . . Fishermen didn’t always talk so much.”

    New equipment and talkativeness are part of what Finne calls the “theatrics” of fishing. He also applied the term to political grandstanding about fishery conservation.

    He shares with many longtime fishermen the belief that the industry left alone manages itself. That is, a species will be hard-hit until stocks dwindle to the point of diminishing returns. Fishermen are then forced from the fishery allowing the species to recover. Against the drone of the diesel, the mate told how fishing as a lifelong occupation was disappearing.

    “Real fishermen often can’t take the gaff,” the gaff in this instance being the business of society at large. He said local baymen now seemed like Indians consigned to a reservation by a new society.     — Russell Drumm

   Jean Carlos Barrientos, an East Hampton High School junior who was one of the stars on the boys soccer team that won the school’s first-ever county championship last fall, was hailed for another reason at the athletic awards dinner on June 6.

    Four days before, Barrientos, who is a cabana boy at the Driftwood ocean resort just west of Hither Hills State Park, had saved a 34-year-old Brooklyn man, Nicola Devito, from drowning.

    Seeing the man — who was not a guest at the Driftwood — waving his arms in distress, Barrientos had a fellow cabana boy alert with his “walkie-talkie” radio the resort’s superintendent, Perry Halburd, who was in the parking lot nearby, and Arianna Clarke, who was at the front desk, as he dashed into the rough surf with an inflatable rescue device. Clarke phoned 911, and Halburd, who is trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, ran toward the beach.

    The device, however, did not inflate, necessitating a dash back up the beach to a supply shack where the 17-year-old, who later said he “was scared” — but not to the extent that he could not act quickly — retrieved a floatable “torpedo.”

    Halburd, who was questioned Saturday, estimated that Devito was “about 200 yards offshore, plus or minus, in rough water. . . . If it weren’t for J.C. he would have drowned for sure.”

    Barrientos said that when he got to Devito, “he was unconscious, his head was underwater.” Using a cross-chest carry — which he had learned as a 14-year-old when he had been a beach boy at the Amagansett Beach Association under John Ryan Sr., who oversees water safety and lifeguard training in East Hampton — he brought him onto the sandbar, “about 30 yards offshore,” where he was met by Halburd. Together, gripping Devito under each arm, they dragged him through waist to chest-high water to the beach.

    “We put him on his back,” said Halburd. “He had no pulse, he wasn’t breathing — he was dead.” Halburd began C.P.R., aided by a woman who Barrientos said “was either the man’s wife or his girlfriend.”

    Moments later, Randy Hoffman, an advanced emergency medical technician who captains the Amagansett Fire Department’s ambulance squad, carrying an E.K.G. machine with a built-in manual defibrillator and a bag valve oxygen delivery machine, continued C.P.R., through which a pulse was regained. The bag valve machine, which “squeezed air into him,” restored Devito’s breathing.

    “I didn’t shock him,” Hoffman, who owns the Machine Shop in the row of Skimhampton stores on Route 27 in East Hampton, said. “My machine is not automatic — I control it. I had the pads on him, but he wasn’t in a shockable rhythm. He had a pulse, so I didn’t have to shock him. . . . He got better and better as we drove to the hospital. He was very lucky. All the credit goes to the kid.”

    For his part, Barrientos said he was very thankful for the training he’d received as a 14 and 15-year-old from the elder Ryan, all of whose A.B.A. beach boys are required to be in swimming condition and are made (although they are too young to be certified as ocean lifeguards) to take the ocean lifeguard test for practice.

    When told J.C.’s mother, Emma Barrientos, who works at Bridgehampton National Bank, had reported her son as wondering what all the fuss was about, John Ryan Sr. said, “If it weren’t for J.C., that man would be dead. The ocean was rough that day [Sunday, June 3]. A couple of our ocean rescue guys had to struggle swimming from Indian Wells to Atlantic. I’m convinced that if he didn’t have the presence of mind to take that torpedo out with him — you don’t make rescues like this by yourself — one of them would have died.”

    “J.C. was in our junior lifeguard program when he was 14 and 15,” Ryan continued, “but after that he concentrated on soccer. I remember saying when I was in the bank in April to his mother — who was a student of mine once — that he should come out again and take ocean lifeguard training. . . . Well, guess who shows up for training at the Maidstone Club Tuesday — J.C.! Everybody applauded.”

    During a conversation Monday, Barrientos said he would take the ocean lifeguard test on Saturday at Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett. The elder Ryan said J.C. would be “one of about 30” prospective lifeguards there. It is to begin, he said, at 9:30, “and will probably go until noon.”

    And as for next fall, Barrientos said he and his soccer teammates were looking forward to “a really great season.”

    As the start drew near for the Breakwater Yacht Club of Sag Harbor’s final Wednesday night race for the May Cup, Lee Oldak was asked about the pressure. He was loading up his sailing vessel, named Purple Haze.

    “No pressure,” he said, “we’re just out to have fun.” After the race, the Purple Haze crew took the cup, with Jim Vos’s Scoot in second place, and Gossip, owned by Gregg Ames and Steven Kenny, in third.

    Gordon Ryan developed the course for the sailors and serves as captain of the club’s green race committee boat, Sweet Pea. His wife, Diane, took charge of the pin boat, Cynthia, to mark the course in Shelter Island Sound, Smith’s Cove, and Northwest Harbor. Ryan has organized the race for the past eight years, and all essentials were on board Sweet Pea: a dry-erase marker board with the course mapped out, a radio, a foghorn, and flags of various colors. “It’s all about the flags,” he said.

    The race committee boat acts as first responders — for items blown overboard on up to spinnaker disasters, Ryan said. He has earned the appreciation of the sailors for his ability to evaluate wind and water conditions and offer on-the-spot changes of course, when necessary, to improve the race experience. He worked diligently and with a smile this day, continuously checking the wind and tides to get the sailors a broadside-to-the-wind 6 p.m. start.

    After the start, the winds shifted to the south and died down, and Ryan shortened the course from six to three leeward legs, as competitors enjoyed warm breezes and a scenic sunset before heading back to the club to celebrate their smooth sailing. The beautiful afternoon, that last Wednesday in May, ended with a much-anticipated chili cook-off.

    Unlike many traditional yacht clubs, Breakwater is a nonprofit, “non-elitist” organization with a focus on youth programs and charity work in the community. Started in May 1987 by a group of local businesspeople and sailors who enjoyed racing on Wednesday evenings, the club was founded with 75 original members. It now leases from Sag Harbor Village a waterfront property on Bay Street.

    In addition to lessons for kids and adults, the club offers a program for young sailors from East Hampton High School, the Ross School, and Pierson, who sail in the harbor on many weekday afternoons. The students also have opportunities to race other Long Island high school teams in regattas at Port Jefferson and Oyster Bay.

    Between May 1 and Oct. 1, the Breakwater Yacht Club’s Wednesday night races often have 30 or more boats at the starting line, with courses for novice and expert sailors. The club’s summer series consists of three racing classes — spinnaker divisions I and II and a non-spinnaker division — with races beginning at 6 p.m. in the area west of Majors Cove.

    Ashley West, who led the girls cross-country team for four years and the spring track team for five, and Cameron Yusko, a three-sport athlete who played on six straight league-champion golf teams and on one Long Island-championship team, were honored at East Hampton High School’s athletic awards dinner June 6 as recipients of the Paul Yuska award given to the senior class’s top athletes.

    Moreover, Yusko, who played basketball and baseball as well as golf (finishing with an overall record of 51-5-1), and who won a Channel 12 scholar-athlete award in March and was president of the National Honor Society, is the class’s valedictorian. He will attend Duke University in the fall.

    West, who, according to her coaches, Diane O’Donnell and Shani Cuesta, “chased down and reset many of the school’s running records and ran in the state qualifier meet every spring since she was a freshman,” will attend Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa., in the fall.

    During the course of the school year, the boys soccer team won its first county championship since the program was begun here in 1976; the softball team played for a county championship for the first time since 2008; the golf team won its eighth straight league title; the girls soccer and girls lacrosse teams made the playoffs for the first time in those programs’ 10-year histories; the boys swimming team enjoyed its first winning season; Dana Cebulski became the first girls cross-country runner from East Hampton to compete in a state meet, and Marina Preiss competed in a state swimming meet yet again, in the 50 and 100-yard freestyle races.

    Besides boys soccer, girls soccer, golf, girls swimming, boys swimming, and softball, other teams to play in the postseason were girls volleyball and boys volleyball. Girls and boys cross-country were said to have experienced “breakthrough” seasons, and boys basketball, while it did not make the playoffs, staged a remarkable comeback, overcoming a 15-point deficit in the final five and a half minutes to defeat Shoreham-Wading River 57-56 on a coast-to-coast buzzer-beating layup by Thomas King.

    Other athletic awards dinner honorees were Katla Thorsen, James Budd, and Milton Farez, who won Kendall Madison Foundation four-year college scholarships; Linsey Kromer, who won the Molly Cangiolosi outstanding female student-athlete scholarship; Kathryn Hess and Meghan Dombkowski, who won Mae Ann Buchman outstanding athlete scholarships; West and Ryan Joudeh, who received the athletic director Joe Vas’s awards, and Farez and Nicole Miksinski, who won East Hampton High School Coaches Association scholarships “given to athletes who plan to follow a career in physical education, health, or a related field.”

    Moreover, Saoirse McKeon and Trevor Shea received United States Army scholar-athlete awards; Thorsen and Yusko received scholar-athlete plaques; Melanie Mackin and Brock Lownes received the V.F.W. sports and sportsmanship awards given to the junior class’s top athletes, and Budd and Thorsen won scholar-athlete awards from the Suffolk Zone of the New York State Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance.

    In addition, Budd and Hess won the Dellacave award for having represented the community in exemplary fashion in athletic competition, and the following received Gold Key awards given by the state public high school athletic association for having lettered in eight varsity and/or junior varsity sports in their sophomore through senior years — Dombkowski, Farez, Deilyn Guzman, Michael Hamilton, Patrick McGuirk, Miksinski, West, and Yusko.

    Recipients of the 27 teams’ most-valuable, most-improved, and coach’s awards were:

    Adam Cebulski, Michael Peralta, and Mario Zeledon — boys cross-country; Dana Cebulski, Jennifer DiSunno, and Ashley West, girls cross-country; Domb­kowski, Kathryn Wood, and Miksinski, field hockey; Budd, Jhovani Hernandez, and Sergio Betancur, football; Ian Lynch, Matthew Griffiths, and Yusko, golf; Mario Olaya, Alexis Serna, and Jerjes Alban, boys soccer; Raphaelle Franey, Rebecca Friedes, and Jessica Gutierrez, girls soccer.

    Preiss, Shannon Ryan, and Haley Ryan, girls swimming; Jessica Bono, Phoebe Gianis, and Carrie Sullivan, girls tennis; King, Shea, and McGuirk, boys volleyball; Raya O’Neal, Lydia Budd, and Thorsen, girls volleyball; Dayna Dunlop, Skylar Conklin, and Cole Brauer, fall cheerleading; Andrew Payne, Daniel Ruggiero, and Rick Nardo, bowling; Kim O’Sullivan, Sadie Ward, and Julia Boehm, winter cheerleading; King, Juan Cuevas, and Yusko, boys basketball; Kaelyn Ward, Sarah Johnson, and Miksinski, girls basketball.

    Lucas Escobar, Jacob Hands, and Sawyer Bushman, wrestling; Guzman, Cebulski, and Shea, winter boys track; West, Thorsen, and Cebulski, winter girls track; Thomas Brierley, Kyle Sturmann, and Peter Skerys, boys swimming; Ryan Joudeh, James McMullan, and Michael Abreu and Brandon Brophy, baseball; Michael Jara, Alexis Serna, and Ryan Fitzgerald, boys lacrosse; Maggie Pizzo, Katie Brierley and Amanda Seekamp, and Allison Charde, girls lacrosse; Casey Waleko and Hess, and Ali Harned, softball; Andrew Davis, Keith Schad, and Collin Kavanaugh, boys tennis; Cebulski, and Jacob Hands and Hamilton, spring boys track, and West, Hannah Jacobs, and Brauer, spring girls track.

    Ryan Siebert, a 20-year-old from Patchogue, who was third last year, won Saturday’s Robert Aaron memorial triathlon in Montauk in one hour, 52 minutes, and 46.5 seconds.

    The young winner, who competed in his first triathlon when he was 10, topped a field of 525 finishers, bettering last year’s time by about three minutes.

    Because it was the race’s 30th anniversary, Siebert, whose splits were 23:53 in the mile swim, 47:20 in the 22-mile bike, and 38:47 in the 10K run, said he had persuaded his mother, Denise Hannon Siebert, 56, who was the women’s winner at Montauk in 1984, to do it too. She placed 247th over all in 2:39.15.3, and won the 55-to-59 women’s category.

    The women’s winner was once again Laurel Wassner, a 36-year-old pro from New York City, who has dominated here since 2007, and who in 2011 became the first female ever to win Montauk outright, in 1:53:25.3. Her time this year was 1:58:54.3, good for 10th place over all, two spots behind the 51-year-old Eben Jones, who has won this event nine times in his career.

    After his last win at Montauk in 2002, in 1:51:55, the former world’s top amateur, who lives in New Canaan, Conn., and is the father of four, said he forwent triathletic competition for a decade — though he continued to ride road and mountain bikes and to ski — “until my wife bought me a bike last year for my 50th birthday.”

    “I came back today because Merle [McDonald Aaron, the race director and widow of its late founder] asked me,” said Jones after crossing the line in eighth place, in 1:57:37.5.

    While his swim and bike splits Saturday were right there with the times he posted 10 years ago, his run was five-and-a-half minutes slower. Eying a fellow triathlete, Jones said, “I’m doing well in my age group — I won the nationals last year and was fourth at Hawaii — but, as he knows, once you hit 45 you slow down.”

    Siebert, whose mother has qualified for the sprint competition in the world triathlon championships, which are, he said, to be contested in London next year, hopes he’ll be able to go too, as an Olympic-distance competitor. He had recently “won Great South Bay and placed fifth in the Elite Amateurs in Texas.”

    Eighteenth out of the water, Siebert said he “made up time on the bike . . . I’m not sure what I did on the run.”

    Wassner, who said she’d been “very happy” with a fifth-place finish the week before in a half-Ironman in Connecticut that had drawn nationally-ranked competitors — a race in which she’d not done well the year before owing to the deleterious effects of a frigid lake swim — knew she wouldn’t be able to go all out here. “I only decided to come two days before the race,” she said. “My coach hadn’t wanted me to come.”

    But it was Montauk’s 30th anniversary, and so she did.

    David Powers, 44, of New York City and Wainscott, the winner here in 2008, the runner-up in 2010 — and the apparent winner last year until the corrected time of Wassner, who had started the swim five minutes behind the elite men, was posted — seemed well on his way to winning again Saturday, but a muffed “flying dismount” coming into the transition area at the end of his 47:16 bike leg resulted in multiple contusions and cuts that rendered him hors de combat. When the accident occurred, Powers, who was sixth out of the water, in 21:44, had a lead of at least several minutes.

    John Broich, 51, of Sag Harbor, placed 38th, in 2:10.24.6, and was fourth in the 50-54 group that Jones topped. Erin Tintle, 40, of East Hampton, who placed 99th, in 2:24:08.1, won among the 40-44 women. David Pitches, 66, who placed 354th, in 2:48:52.5, won among the 65-69 men, and Fran McConnell, 61, of East Hampton, who placed 524th, in 3:50:49.1, was fourth among the 60-64 women.

    Jitters played a hand in the Pierson (Sag Harbor) High School softball team’s 12-1 loss to Greenwich in a state Final Four semifinal in upstate Queensbury Saturday, though the facts remained that for the first time ever, the Whalers, whose coach is Melissa Edwards, had won Long Island and regional championships.

    The team defeated East Rockaway 9-1 to win the Long Island championship — the first time Pierson had ever defeated East Rockaway. And, in the regional game, the Whalers defeated Tuxedo 4-1. Edwards and her players were greeted on their 11 p.m. return from the regional game by a victory parade.

    After Saturday’s game, according to an account in Newsday, Kasey Gilbride, League VIII’s player of the year, who accounted for the Whalers’ sole run by homering over the center-field fence in the seventh inning, and Pierson’s senior pitcher, Melanie Stafford, said they had been playing extra hard of late for their coach, whose father, Charles Edwards, died May 3 after the delivery truck he was driving struck a tree on North Haven.

    “We went into each game playing for Coach Edwards and her father,” Gilbride was quoted as saying. “We wanted to make her proud, each game, each pitch. It was definitely a motivator for us.”

    Edwards told Newsday’s Evan Korn, “These girls kept me going this season through everything, and I can’t be any more proud than I am.”   

Brenneman Cited

    Tyler Brenneman, a son of Tim and Debbie Brenneman of East Hampton, and a midfielder on Notre Dame’s Final Four men’s lacrosse team, has been named as the recipient of a National Collegiate Athletic Association Elite 89 award given to sophomore-or-above athletes whose cumulative grade-point average tops their Final Four peers. Brenneman, an economics major who is to study in that field in England this summer, has a 3.782 g.p.a. He is the first Notre Dame men’s lacrosse player to be so honored.

10K, Turbo Tri Races

    A Turbo Tri triathlon, a fund-raiser for the I-Tri triathletic program for teenage girls, is to be held at Maidstone Park Saturday at 6 p.m. The contestants are to cover the same course — 300-yard swim, 7-mile bike, and 1.5-mile run — that Sharon McCobb’s Youth Triathlon contestants will on July 22.

    Saturday’s race, also overseen by McCobb, is open to “all ability levels ages 17 and up.”

    A half-hour before the Turbo Tri is to begin, about 1,700 entrants are to set forth in the Shelter Island 10K, among them the former Olympians Bill Rodgers, Joan Benoit Samuelson, and Keith Brantly, as well as Shelter Island’s Olympic sailor, Amanda Clark, who is to compete in the London Games this summer.        The elite runners are to be on hand for a meet-and-greet tomorrow outside Shelter Island’s American Legion Hall before the pre-race pasta dinner.

Friday, June 15

LITTLE LEAGUE, game three of Reds-Diamondbacks final series, if necessary, Pantigo fields, 5:30 p.m.

Saturday, June 16

LIFEGUARDING, ocean certification test, Indian Wells Beach, Amagansett, 9:30 a.m.-noon.

SHELTER ISLAND 10K, in front of Shelter Island High School, 5:30 p.m.

TURBO-TRI, 300-yard swim, 7-mile bike, and 1.5-mile run, fund-raiser for I-Tri program, Maidstone Park, Springs, 6 p.m.

    He believes it could be the beginning of a big payback. “Nature’s vengeance. For all the tweety birds I shot with my BB gun, and all the fish, and all the ducks. I’m probably going to be stomped to death by webbed feet.”

    What’s prompted Harvey Bennett’s concerns was a run-in with a deer early in the morning last Thursday near Dev­on in Amagansett.

    “I just bought a really nice bike. It was the third time I rode it. I just caught the deer out of the corner of my eye. Next thing I knew I was laying in the road. He must have grazed the rear end. I’m bruised and my knee got skunned up [that’s Bonac for “skinned” as in “skunning an eel”], but I’m okay.”

    Striped bass, bluefish, porgies, and fluke are in good supply in Gardiner’s Bay, but he said he’s not sure if he dare go fishing.

    The big question coming out of the Montauk SurfMasters Tournament this week is this: Will Gary Krist regret not weighing in his 21.36-pound striped bass? Not a big bass, relatively speaking, but then again the surfcasting harvest since the spring shoot-out tournament began on May 1 has been lean, to say the least. Krist’s fish did place second in the Paulie’s Tackle shop tournament over the weekend.

    The point is, a 20-something-pound striped bass could very well take the prize, so better to look silly weighing in a 20-pounder than look silly when a smaller one wins it all. 

    The good news is there has been some pretty consistent casting action on the north side of the Montauk Lighthouse in recent days. Fred Kalkstein, an organizer of the Montauk SurfMasters tourney, said there was a 32-pounder taken over the weekend using a darter lure, “and some very reliable rumors of a few ‘lost girls,’ which would have tipped the scales north of 20 pounds for sure.”

    Speaking of lost girls, the state Department of Environmental Conservation has decided to reduce the number of tags that each of the state’s commercial striped bass permit holders get this year. By state law, each bass caught for the market must be tagged.

    The reason, according to Arnold Leo, secretary of the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association, stems from the fact that the state allocated more tags to each fisherman last year because for several years the overall state quota had not been met. “Lo and behold, last year instead of the usual 10 percent underage, they used up all the tags, plus the average weight of the fish was greater,” Mr. Leo said.

    The state quota for commercial fishermen will be 828,000 pounds this year, down from 854,731 pounds. The number of permit holders has remained pretty much the same. Each permit holder received 241 tags last year. They will get 210 for 2012.

    The extra tags and extra weight resulted in a harvest surplus, thus the reduction in tags this year. Mr. Leo said that unlike the commercial fishery, the recreational side has no harvest cap. Sports are permitted to catch as many bass as they can at a rate of one per day, or two per day on for-hire boats, that measure at least 28 inches long. The total catch is computed later via random survey.

    “The argument we would make is that this is a reallocation of the fishery, allowing the sportfishing quota to increase while capping the commercial harvest and then not acknowledging that the stock is in such good shape. There is a colossal stock of adult bass,” Mr. Leo said.

    A portion of that colossal stock was caught during the Ducks Unlimited fishing tournament held from the Star Island Yacht Club over the weekend. Scott Leonard, who runs the tackle section at the yacht club, said the winning bass weighed 41 pounds. Most of the bass weighed in the 20 to 30-pound range were caught trolling. During a fishing trip Sam Gershowitz, the yacht club owner, and friends caught two 35-pound bass on eels.  

    The yacht club is selling live bait eels and live bunker, which are usually in stock Thursdays and Fridays for weekend anglers.

    Mr. Leonard reported excellent fluke fishing over the weekend with “a lot of eights” being caught. That is, eight-pound summer flounder. And Mr. Bennett reported the same productive fluke fishing around Buoy 2 in Gardiner’s Bay. Dinner-plate-size porgies are schooling in the bay as well.