The first national marine monument in the Atlantic, designated last month by President Obama under the 1906 Antiquities Act, has been criticized by commercial fishermen who say it will harm their livelihoods while failing to achieve its intended purposes.

The Sept. 15 proclamation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a nearly 5,000-square-mile area 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod, was said to be based on threats to the ocean from “various uses, climate change, and related impacts.” 

Recreational fishing will not be affected, but the designation bans commercial fishing 60 days after the proclamation and also prohibits drilling and mining.

The area is home to tuna, marlin, and sharks, as well as whales, sea turtles, and plankton. The harvesting of American lobster and red crab will be allowed to continue, although it is to be phased out over seven years.

Fishermen believe a monument in the Mid-Atlantic is unnecessary and allege it was not based on science but pressure from nongovernmental environmental groups, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Resources Defense Council. To exclude commercial fishermen while allowing recreational fishing makes no sense, fishermen contend. They also claim the monument will not only fail to prevent harm to non-target species such as pilot whales, but will increase interactions with them.

The proclamation states that the designation was designed in part to protect the deep-sea corals, found at depths of more than 3,900 meters, which provide spawning areas, nurseries, and shelter from predators. Bonnie Brady of Montauk, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, called that rationale “completely bogus” because the commercial fishing gear used  for highly migratory species never touches bottom. Those who fish for migratory species, she said, “are absolutely the hardest hit, losing all the canyons and the seamounts within the water column.”

David Schalit, who fishes primarily for such species from the Zerlina, based in Shinnecock Bay, said the only recreational boats that can get to the area “are the larger, or much more expensive, sportfishing vessels that cost between $1 and $4 million. They have to carry so much fuel to get there and back, it would be impossible for a smaller vessel. They’ve created an exclusive country club. . . . I don’t know that they even realize they’ve done that.”

Mr. Schalit is vice president of the American Bluefin Tuna Association. “These tuna, inhabit the top 15 percent of the water column. From a point of view of protection of deep-sea coral, it’s a nonissue. In fact, our commercial fishermen use exactly the same gear as recreational fishermen. If we allow recreational fishing, why wouldn’t we allow our form of commercial fishing?”

He called the monument area very important for commercial fishing “because all of these fish appear at different times of the year in the Northeast Canyon region. . . . We see ourselves as innocent victims of someone else’s agenda.”

“It’s a huge blow,” Hank Lackner of the Jason and Danielle, a trawler based in Montauk, said. “And there was no need for it.” Mr. Lackner cited a draft Deep Sea Corals Amendment to the Mackerel, Squid, and Butterfish Fishery Management Plan, an ongoing effort by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, one of eight regional councils created by the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976. The amendment would protect corals by restricting fishing in select areas and restrict expansion into areas where corals are known or likely to be present. The Mid-Atlantic’s New England counterpart is drafting similar regulations.

“If we were towing there already,” Mr. Lackner said, referring to bottomlands from which commercial fishing would be banned, “it’s most likely there were no coral there unless it’s something we already go around. . . . There’s no reason to protect mud. The council truly protected coral, with a buffer zone.”

Mark Phillips, who fishes for fluke, squid, and haddock from the Greenport-based Illusion, agreed. “The funny thing, there is no coral there. It’s all sand and mud, and I’ve dragged all of that bottom. A handful of boats out of Montauk have dragged it all. There is no coral, period,” he said. Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agree that many of the areas in which trawlers fish are devoid of coral, according to Ms. Brady.

Marty Scanlon of Hauppauge, a pelagic longline fisherman who owns the Provider II, said that, contrary to federal opinion, “all indicators are that stocks are booming. We’re ahead of the rebuilding model they presented originally,” he said, but “there’s no way of applying that in the regulatory process at the time. It’s a mess.”

“Those grounds are way offshore to the east,” Mr. Lackner said of the monument area. “That’s where you want the bigger boats. You don’t want us guys sitting right south of Montauk. We go far offshore, we don’t add to any depletion going on locally. We work on stocks that are rich and vibrant, most of the time 150, 200 miles from the land. That’s part of what’s troubling — if they close that off, it will lump us into one area. If the council was able to do its process, we could remain spread out.”

Mr. Scanlon serves on the board of directors of the Blue Water Fishermen’s Association, and is a member of NOAA’s Atlantic Highly Migratory Species advisory panel and its pelagic longline take reduction team, the latter charged with addressing incidental mortality and injury of pilot whales. He shared Mr. Schalit’s criticism of the prohibition on commercial but not recreational fishing. “Their carbon footprint,” he said of recreational fishing,”is probably 10,000 times more negative than the pelagic longline vessels that are excluded from this area.”

He estimated that 30 vessels are in the area only three to four months a year, “as opposed to thousands of recreational boats. On top of that, those sport boats anchor at times, and that will have a direct negative impact.” “I don’t understand the logic behind closing something,” Mr. Phillips said, “and then they gave lobstermen seven years to get out of there.” The Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association opposed the monument in a statement last month. “We find it deplorable that the government is kicking the domestic fishing fleet out of an area where they sustainably harvest healthy fish stocks,” the statement read.

Nongovernmental organizations are wrong, the statement said. “There is little place for these fishermen to go that will maintain the productivity that they have worked so hard to achieve, while avoiding gear conflict, bycatch, and protected resources.”

“The more you inhibit that ability to move,” Mr. Scanlon agreed, “it hinders our ability to do what they’re asking us to do,” such as avoid interaction with protected species like whales.

Mr. Lackner called the ban “disheartening,” and pointed to environmental groups. “For them, it’s never enough. Their goal is to totally stop fishing, from what I can see. We’re the most regulated fishing fleet in the world, and all our stocks are rebuilt.

What are we trying to stop?”

The press office at the White House had not responded to an email seeking comment by noon Wednesday.

The Army Corps of Engineers’ plans for the downtown Montauk beach could include adding enough sand to create a 50-foot-wide beach along an expanse roughly double the length of the area where the corps has installed a sandbag wall, representatives said last week.

The design would be in line with what East Hampton Town officials have requested and would be a more extensive project than what is proposed in the corps’s long-awaited Fire Island to Montauk Point shoreline restoration plan, which includes coastal projects of various types along 83 miles of Long Island’s south shore. The plan was the subject of a hearing at the Montauk Playhouse on Sept. 30.

A draft plan had proposed the addition of only 120,000 cubic yards of sand in front of the sandbag seawall on the downtown beach, to be replenished by the federal agency once every four years for a 30-year period. But what is needed, according to a report prepared for East Hampton Town, is an immediate influx of 759,000 cubic yards of sand along 6,000 feet of shoreline, with 414,000 more cubic yards added every four years.

Steve Couch of the Army Corps said at the Sept. 30 meeting that the Corps had just that day received the town’s request and accompanying data, but that “our thinking is really in line with what the town is proposing.”

The Army Corps had already determined that adding enough sand to create a 40 to 50-foot-wide beach was “appropriate methodology” to provide the needed level of protection from ocean surges during storms, he said, in order to protect the buildings on the waterfront and in low-lying downtown Montauk.

The agency is also considering extending the area of beach where sand would be added by 1,500 feet to the east and west of the 3,100-foot stretch where the sandbags have been installed.

“This is the type of feedback we’re looking for,” he said. The ultimate plan, said an Army Corps spokeswoman, must be determined to be “engineeringly feasible, economically justified, and environmentally acceptable.”

The audience at the Montauk Playhouse presentation last week applauded East Hampton Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell as he delivered the town’s request for a “full-scale beach replenishment project.”

New York State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. also endorsed that recommendation, saying that the proposed sand addition was “simply not adequate when it comes to the protection of downtown Montauk,” an area he called “environmentally sensitive” and an “economically important area for all of Long Island.”

The ocean beach is Montauk’s “single most important attraction,” said Paul Monte of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce. The sand addition outlined in the draft Fire Island to Montauk plan is “a mere drop in the bucket,” he said, “and falls far short of what is needed.”

Aram Terchunian of First Coastal, a coastal geologist hired by East Hampton Town to draft its response to the corps, said that his economic analysis concluded that a more substantial beach reconstruction could avoid $8 million in potential damages from floods, and ensure “approximately $4 million in recreation benefits” reaped by visits to the Montauk beach by some 300,000 visitors a year who stay in Montauk motels. Anecdotal evidence from the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Terchunian said, showed that bookings decline when the beach area narrows.

Montauk, he said, needs a “sustainable beach” to maintain its economic activity.

Beach sand in front of the sandbag wall was eroded last month when Tropical Storm Hermine churned up seas over several days. Sand on top of the bags was also washed away and a number of the exposed sandbags were damaged. Surf conditions earlier this week left more bags uncovered, and water lapping at the sandbag wall, eliminating any dry area of the beach.

The sandbag wall “performed as expected, as designed,” Mr. Terchunian said, by keeping the ocean away from shorefront buildings, “but clearly it’s not enough.”

“We feel that it did do what it was supposed to do,” said the Army Corps spokeswoman.

The installation of the sandbags was completed in advance of the Army Corps’s Fire Island to Montauk Point project as an emergency measure, with funding provided by Congress after Hurricane Sandy. It was described as an interim measure until the projects covered in the shoreline study could be undertaken.

The corps is not planning to remove the sandbags, as had been expected, it was learned last week. Instead, they would become “a backstop” to the restored beach, and provide “a higher level of risk reduction in the area,” said Mr. Couch.

With an expected 15-year lifespan, they would simply be removed piecemeal as bags reached the end of their useful life.

“We need to talk seriously about how we can get those sandbags out of there,” Jeremy Samuelson, the president of Concerned Citizens of Montauk, said to a round of applause from attendees at the hearing. “Managed retreat,” he said, is the only long-term solution to shoreline issues. He endorsed the idea of a “large-scale, sand-only” bolstering of the beach “as we transition to managed retreat over time.”

In some cases, the Army Corps’s plan proposes the purchase of real estate to eliminate coastal development, following a policy of “retreat” from rising sea levels and encroaching surf.

The estimated $1.1 billion cost of all the projects contained in the plan includes $603 million for property purchase for changes to buildings within the floodplain, a strategy endorsed by some as the only logical, long-term response in the face of expected sea level rise.

Using some of the project funding to purchase real estate along the oceanfront, eliminating development in the flood zone, as is proposed for some of the other areas of Long Island, “would be a powerful long-term plan that would last a lot longer than 30 years,” said Carl Irace, an East Hampton attorney who represents Defend H2O, an environmental group that has challenged the Army Corps seawall project in court.

Though many at last week’s meeting were glad to hear that the Army Corps will consider adding additional sand to the Montauk beach, even that reconstruction would be “a stopgap measure,” said Kevin McAllister of Defend H2O.

“We need to move back that front row of buildings,” he said, and rebuild dunes “with beach vegetation that that will take, and hopefully we will have a viable beach dune system,” he said to sustained applause from the audience.

The proposal for downtown Montauk was minimal in comparison to other projects proposed for the long-range shore protection project area, but despite requests that beach restoration be considered for Ditch Plain, it includes for areas east of Montauk’s downtown.

“I think disregarding Ditch Plains is a big mistake,” Lou Cortese of the Ditch Plains Association said at last week’s hearing, citing $200 million in property values in the area, and the potential environmental damage to the ocean beach as well as Lake Montauk should it be inundated and septic systems wiped out. Investment in the area did not meet the corps’s economic cost-to-benefit test, said Mr. Couch, but additional information submitted by the town in that regard will be assessed, he said.

The Army Corps is proceeding separately on a project to shore up the stone armoring around the base of the Montauk Lighthouse, extending and repairing the revetment. That project is not a part of the Fire Island to Montauk Point plan.

Gina Bradley, who owns Paddle Diva, which offers lessons in the recreational use of paddleboards, has a retail shop, and teaches yoga, has appealed to the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals to reverse a decision by the town’s head building inspector in March that her operation at the Shagwong Marina on Three Mile Harbor constitutes an illegal expansion of its use.

The Shagwong Marina, which rents 66 boat slips, is owned by Ben Kru­pinksi, who is also an owner of East Hampton Point, just down the road.

On Tuesday, when the zoning board took up Ms. Bradley’s Paddle Diva appeal, Z.B.A. members found themselves delving inconclusively into matters such as whether a paddleboard is a boat, and, if so, whether they can be stored at marinas legally, and whether a retail store at which they are sold was comparable to a marina’s supply store.

That answers to these questions differed was clear when John Whelan, the chairman of the zoning board, and Richard Whalen, an attorney representing Ms. Bradley, spoke. The discussion led to comment about Paddle Diva’s website, which announces yoga as one of the classes at the marina.

“As you know, we turned down yoga at the Surf Lodge,” Mr. Whelan said. “I am not saying she has the right to conduct yoga activities on this property,” Ms. Bradley’s attorney responded, adding that he was only concerned with whether paddleboards were boats.

Yoga instruction at the Surf Lodge is among proliferating recreational classes townwide that have drawn attention in recent summers, especially when they are offered on public property such as the beach at Montauk’s Ditch Plain, where surfing lessons are prevalent.

Before the hearing was over, Ms. Bradley said, “I will go home tonight and remove yoga. I am laughing that we are talking about this. What better place to have paddleboarding?”

On behalf of Ms. Bradley, Mr. Whalen described the sequence of events that led to the appeal. Paddle Diva had begun running classes, storing paddleboards, and eventually converting an office in a small building into a retail store in 2012.

Last year, Mr. Whalen reminded the board, the town issued a notice of violation for that conversion, and Ms. Bradley applied to the planning board retroactively for a permit to allow it. The planners turned to the building inspector for an interpretation of Paddle Diva’s use, which lead to the negative conclusion. In Mr. Whalen’s opinion, however, a paddleboard should be considered a boat for legal purposes.

Mr. Whelan, the zoning board chairman, and Mr. Whalen then discussed whether a recreational marina is allowed to host a paddleboard school. Mr. Whalen said they were comparable to boating classes, which would be legal at a marina, and argued that since paddleboards are not specifically excluded under the code, they are an allowed use.

The board also discussed parking and sanitary facilities, and it was pointed out that calculations had been based on the number of slips at the marina before Paddle Diva set up shop.

Roy Dalene read a letter from a neighbor opposing a reversal of Ms. Glennon’s determination. He suggested the boards were being stored at the marina since they are removed from the water every day, although under the town code, boats can be stored at boat yards, but not marinas.

Rose Grau, who had previously owned the marina and still owns two adjacent parcels, spoke to the board, saying Paddle Diva advertises activities beyond paddleboarding.

“She has erected a 20-foot flagpole and offers soft drinks,” she said. She told the board that six vans had parked on her property one day and when the drivers were asked to remove them, they said they were there for a photo shoot involving Paddle Diva.

“She still uses our entrance to the beach,” Ms. Grau said. On a softer note, Ms. Grau said inexperienced paddleboarders at the entrance to the marina from the harbor were “a hazard and a safety concern for our paddleboarders and our sailors.” She called the Paddle Diva operation “a violation of the integrity and character of the neighborhood.”

“I don’t want to become the behemoth paddleboard business of the East,” Ms. Bradley said before the hearing was closed. The board has 62 days to reach a decision. Cate Rogers, a member of the Z.B.A., recused herself from taking part in its deliberations.

When the bell rings at 1:29 p.m. at the Springs School, signaling the end of sixth period, students from the fourth through the eighth grade immediately flood the hallways. With just two minutes to get to their next class, at least 300 students at any given moment dodge classmates who are opening lockers, rushing by or taking their time, and perhaps horsing around. This was the case even after custodians at the start of the year put down a line of green tape on some of the hallways’ floors to encourage students to stay to the right when going in either direction.

To a recent visitor, the scene was reminiscent of a stampede or like rush hour on Montauk Highway in July. But the crush is commonplace at the school, where officials say growing enrollment has put pressure on a building that is aging and bursting at the seams.

• RELATED: Morale Is an Issue

Melissa Knight, a fourth-grade teach­er in her 16th year at Springs, said she had seen the school evolve. “I don’t feel we’re a small school anymore.” She added, however, that the public’s view of the school as a small one did not seem to have changed.

Ms. Knight is among many teachers who say the school, which was built in 1931, needs more classrooms and additional spaces for students to learn in.

“We’ve had to get really crafty,” said Ms. Knight, who has 26 students and a co-teacher to help out. “We got donations from different companies to make our room better for the kids,” she said, adding, “You don’t have a lot of room to move within the classroom. The kids don’t notice it, but it really is a struggle.”

The school’s music room is not handicapped-accessible. Because the art room cannot handle all the demand, the teachers often pack materials on mobile carts and push them to other classrooms. The school’s common room is an all-purpose space where indoor recess takes place, teachers lead small group lessons, staff can often be found eating lunch, PTA events are held, and where many other activities take place because they do not fit anywhere else.

Other problems include a crammed gymnasium and the lack of a dedicated computer room. The school had a computer lab, but it had to be converted to a regular classroom this year. At one point, Alec Baldwin, the actor who lives in Amagansett, donated a baby grand piano to the school, but the PTA had to raffle it off because there was simply no space for it.

To house some of its youngest students, the school relies on exterior buildings, including the Springs Youth Association building and two portable buildings added decades ago as temporary structures.

Lindamarie Kirby, who teaches first grade in the youth association building, said her students lose precious learning time because they have to travel to the main building for certain activities.

“It depends on the day — shoes to be tied, weather conditions. It could be 10 minutes off a period, conservatively,” she said.

Eric Casale, the school principal, said  overcrowding was now at a point where he is worried about safety, as well as the security of the students in the outbuildings.

In case of an emergency, “we could have as many as 1,000 people here to evacuate. It’s at a critical point,” he said.

Jessica Vickers teaches what are called reading “intervention” classes in a classroom that has been divided into three smaller rooms with temporary Sheet­rock walls. Her area has no windows, while the adjoining teachers, who provide services like physical or occupational therapy, have windows but no door leading to the hallway. Students walk through Ms. Vickers’s classroom to get to the other two rooms. Ms. Vickers said distractions abound and space to store materials is hard to find.

“When there are so many different types of services going on in the same area, that’s when it can be a challenge,” she said. “I give this staff a lot of credit. We kind of bend over backwards for each other,” she added later.

A number of other classrooms have been similarly divided. A former custodial supply room now houses the copy machine; the original copy machine room is now the guidance counselor’s office. The school social worker’s office is the former foyer of the original school building; the school psychologist’s office used to be a closet.

Adam Osterweil, who teaches seventh-grade English, said, “If you looked at the square footage of this building per child, the number would be dramatically different than any other school, but at the same time, if you walked around the building, you would see a lot of happy children. We make it work, and the children feel supported here. . . . Yet if we have to open up one additional classroom, we don’t have an answer to where that’s going.”

Mr. Casale’s latest enrollment report shows Springs with 740 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, with three more pending registration this week. This is up from 722 students last year, most notably due to the closing of the Child Development Center of the Hamptons. Another 37 students are in prekindergarten at the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church school building in East Hampton. Enrollment ranges from 67 kids each in the  sixth and seventh grades to 97 in the fifth grade.

Springs has 370 lockers for students from the sixth through eighth grades, with only about a dozen unassigned this year. The school ran out of lockers in 2000, and kids shared them until 2002, when the school’s new wing opened. If the school runs out of lockers this year, there will be one key difference: There is no new wing under construction.

According to a January 2016 long-range planning study by the Western Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services, enrollment in Springs grew 30.5 percent, or by 167 students, between 2005 and 2015. The study predicted the school would peak at 739 students in 2019, but it already has surpassed that figure. The study projects a drop to 687 students by the year 2025. For its 2015-16 school year projection, the BOCES study was 98.5 percent accurate.

Right now, according to John J. Finello, the district superintendent, average class sizes are at or below the school board’s target size of 25 students.

A Line Is Drawn

The idea of school expansion has drawn a clear line in the community. Time and time again at school board meetings, a handful of residents speaks up to say there are people in the community on fixed incomes who may not be able to support the bond the school would need to finance a major capital project. They question the potential size of the project, which, in preliminary discussions, has included a second gym and as many as 16 new classrooms. They also question the hiring of an architect, who apparently is to be paid on a sliding scale of up to 5 percent of a project that has not yet been capped at a certain dollar amount.

Often absent from the meetings are those who support expansion. One person who supports a referendum is Alicia Wiltshire, whose four children went through the school. “It’s long overdue. They’ve been using every creative and imaginative way around it to not put the burden on the community. They desperately need space.”

Scott Faulkner, a parent of two who  was a member of the facilities committee, which in 2015 was charged with making recommendations on space, said, “It should be a foregone conclusion that it needs capital improvements. I don’t see how anybody could go into that school and think otherwise,” he said. He went on to call the school fantastic and the teachers great. “I give credit to the people who teach there — they don’t let it get to them,” he said.

Chris Tucci, a parent of four who said he was a cautious supporter of expansion, also said it was getting harder and harder to verify that the district is expanding at the rate projected or that it would expand much more.

Mr. Tucci works in the building industry and said families seem to be priced out of the local housing market, with second homeowners coming in instead. However, the school “is ultimately crowded as it is, and you really have to figure that it’s a possibility that it could expand more,” he said. He suggested that if the school builds to accommodate enrollment growth but then sees a drop, the new space could be used to decrease class sizes and bring the prekindergarten back from Most Holy Trinity.

“I think it has to be given some really deep thought,” Mr. Tucci said. “Moreover, they have repairs to make anyway. If they make those repairs while they’re expanding, it should bring the dollar amount down on those repairs.”

A 20-year-old cabbie in a yellow New York City medallion taxi allegedly missed the turn onto East Hampton's Main Street from Woods Lane early Friday morning, crossed the lawn south of the pond, and crashed through the fence of the Hedges Inn.

The driver, Toriqul Islam Munna, was subsequently arrested on a drunken-driving charge. Mr. Munna took a breath test at police headquarters. Police said it produced a reading of .17 of 1 percent, just below the .18 number that would have raised the misdemeanor charge to the more serious aggravated driving while intoxicated level. The car, a 2013 Toyota Camry, is registered to a Long Island City mini corporation cab company.

Mr. Munna told police he had driven some friends out to East Hampton from the city after drinking a couple of shots of tequila. He was arraigned later Friday morning in East Hampton Town Justice Court by Justice Lisa R. Rana, who set bail at $250. It was posted by the defendant's father, who was in the courtroom for the proceedings. Mr. Munna, who lives in South Richmond Hill, Queens, had his license suspended by Justice Rana based upon the .17 reading.

For the second time in recent weeks, a routine traffic stop on Montauk's Main Street has resulted in the arrest of the driver on cocaine trafficking charges.

East Hampton Town police said they stopped Alimdzkan Angeles-Abreu's Honda Acura on the Plaza Friday at about 9 p.m. for having a burnt-out license plate light. Mr. Angeles-Abreu did not have a valid driver's license and was charged as an unlicensed driver.

The officer who made the stop then asked if he could search the vehicle, and was given permission to do so. The driver "was acting nervous, making nervous movements," Detective Sgt. Greg Schaefer explained on Saturday. Nothing was found inside the car, but when the officer searched the trunk he found cocaine, the detective said, along with packaging material.

Mr. Angeles-Abreu, 37, was charged with two Class B felonies, possessing cocaine with intent to sell and having over a half-ounce of the narcotic, as well as possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor. At his arraignment Saturday morning, he told East Hampton Town Justice Lisa R. Rana that he has lived with his girlfriend in Montauk for the past two years.

The district attorney's office asked that bail be set at $30,000. The defendant, who is originally from the Dominican Republic, has had prior brushes with the law, and a warrant for his arrest, issued in Elizabeth, N.J., is current.

Justice Rana set bail at $25,000, which was not posted, and Mr. Angeles-Abreu was taken to the county jail in Riverside. His next court date is Thursday.

A Sept. 9 traffic stop of a 2004 Trailblazer, not far from Friday night's incident, resulted in three arrests on drug-trafficking charges. Elvin Silva-Ruiz, the driver, and his passengers, Eddie Matos-Ramos, and Jonathan Hernandez-Ruiz, all face the same two felony charges as Mr. Angeles-Abreu. They are currently free, and will return to Justice Court unless they are indicted, when their cases would be heard instead in Suffolk County criminal court. 

The bay anchovy is a small and translucent baitfish that typically arrives in great numbers around the East End in September. False albacore, bluefish, and striped bass aggressively feed on this one-to-three-inch prey species. It’s always a challenge for surfcasters to find a lure in their bag that matches the petite size and profile of a bay anchovy and can also be cast to fish feeding a nice distance from shore.

One sure way to send a small light lure a long distance is to utilize a casting egg, a one-to-two-ounce piece of painted solid wood in the shape of an egg that has small metal loops on each end. The casting egg was invented in the early 1950s by Jerry Sylvester, a prominent Rhode Island surfcaster, who wanted to deliver a small jig beyond a bar to early-season pollock feeding on a rocky bottom. Its use was quickly adopted by striped bass fishermen at the time and is very popular today with surfcasters in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The casting egg is also used by New England spin fishermen to deliver a small fly to false albacore with lockjaw for tins and softbaits.   

Rigging a casting egg is simple. The terminal end of the fishing line is tied to one of the egg’s metal loops and a three-foot section of 30-pound monofilament or fluorocarbon leader material is tied to the other loop. A fly or even a small bucktail, little swimmer, or light rubber jig is attached to the end of the leader to complete the rig. In many respects, a casting egg rig is just a bulked-up snapper popper.

The naturally aerodynamic shape of an egg allows it to punch through a wind and carry a fly or small lure deep into the surf. A casting egg rig can be worked a couple different ways. The angler can retrieve the floating egg at a slow to moderate pace allowing the churning waters to impart a lively action to the trailing imitation. Alternatively, the angler can fling the egg and let it float in place with the roiling surf providing erratic movement to the egg and the following fly or lure. The casting egg rig is particularly effective when fished over a shallow rocky area because it keeps the lure above underwater obstacles. Videos of anglers using the casting egg can be found online.

If you can’t find a casting egg locally, one can be purchased online from the Salty’s tackle shop in Massachusetts at saltwaterplugs.com or fabricated from wooden eggs found at craft stores or online. If you choose the latter route, make sure you are purchasing eggs that weigh at least one ounce individually. A poor-man’s third option is to remove the hooks from a floating plug and add a short leader to the rear hook loop or ring. Some anglers cleverly use a small piece of a wooden broom handle in place of a wooden egg.  

We interrupt this fishing season for wind, wind, wind, and rain. Few boats if any left their docks and only the most hardcore surf anglers hit the beach during this recent spell of terrible weather. But those who ventured out to the Point to stand on rocks battered by 12-foot waves were rewarded with stripers up to 40 pounds, reported Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor. Ocean beaches were also productive but the strong current sweep required successful anglers to sling bucktails of up to four ounces, Morse added. Shinnecock Inlet was also a productive location, with 12 anglers hooking up simultaneously, according to one witness.

In addition to striped bass, weakfish were also taken from local beaches. Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported that a 15-pound fish was landed behind the Maidstone Club. False Albacore remain in the vicinity despite the rough conditions they typically disdain, Bennett added. 

Green crabs beware. Blackfish season opened yesterday.

The Star’s fishing columnist can be followed on Twitter, @ehstarfishing. Photos of prize catches can be emailed to David Kuperschmid at fishreport@ ehstar.com.

While we see if Hurricane Matthew, a humdinger of a storm in the Caribbean Sea as of Monday, comes to us or spins off toward Europe, it’s a good time to go over some of the coastal terms that we have all heard from past experiences, but may have faded into the non-recall department. There is no better place to review them than on both sides of the South Fork, especially with respect to Matthew and the northeaster season coming up.

Whether Long Island is a true island or not, it owes most of its origin and features to the Wisconsin glaciation, which landed two times in the last 25,000 years or so. However, the post-glacial era has wrought a slew of geomorphological changes, so if we were able to Google a photograph of Long Island as it looked 10,000 years ago we wouldn’t recognize it. 

Its aspect is very different today, particularly because it’s not underpinned by bedrock the way New England and the rest of New York State, including New York City, are, but composed of aggregates of loose soil, sediments, gravel, and large rocks. The large rocks are not as mobile as the smaller stuff, but they do fall out of bluffs onto the shore on both sides of the South Fork, particularly in Montauk. They move only “relatively,” i.e., as the coastal bluffs continue recede, as they have been doing for thousands of year; the biggest rocks, or “glacial erratics,” find themselves situated deeper and deeper in the sea.

Take Lionhead Rock in the bay off the hamlet of Springs, for example. It started out in the landmass east of Three Mile Harbor and ended up in its present spot as the bluffs west of Hog Creek wore back toward the south. All of the large boulders strewn along the shores of the Peconic Estuary were once rooted in the fast land. In Montauk and Noyac there are loads that still are. Take a peak at Sag Harbor’s waters on the seaward side of the 114 bridge at low tide and you will see the many boulders deposited in the harbor as North Haven’s bluffs wore back and the harbor waters rose. 

If you were to take a peek along the Long Island Sound bluffs in Mattituck and Peconic east of Mattituck Creek it would remind you of Montauk east of Ditch Plain. The latest research by coastal geologists suggests that some or all of these big stones came from the bottom of Long Island Sound as the glacier advanced, helping to created the sound’s basin, which stretches from the Bronx in New York to Block Island Sound between Orient and Montauk Points.

As the glaciers melted, water ran out to the ocean, later to the Peconic Estuary. You don’t find any boulders in the ocean’s edge west of downtown Montauk because they have yet to wash out of the bluffs west of Montauk. You don’t find any on both sides of the Napeague isthmus because the isthmus didn’t exist until well after the glacial sheet retreated and erosion from both sides of Napeague Harbor, which was open on both ends, drifted onto the bottom, raising the isthmus above sea level and closing it off on the ocean side. Don’t look now, but it could open again in the next 50 years or so.

The famous Napeague ocean dune field owes part of its existence to the sedimentary materials moving westerly in the ocean’s long shore drift from east to west, but some of it came from the isthmus as it receded to the north. For a thousand years or more the only vegetation of the isthmus was beach grass and salt marsh grasses. Now the isthmus is half covered with beach plums, shads, pitch pines, and other woodies.

A late 1700s nautical chart shows Napeague Harbor opened widely to Gardiner’s Bay. There was no Hicks Island and no Goff Point on the other side of an east inlet. Over the millenniums, the harbor has been kept open by northwesterly winds blowing sand onto the bay’s east shores, then up into the fast land of Hither Woods, creating the famous Walking Dunes that are creeping slowly to the south-southeast at a few centimeters per year. The lead-in one has been stopped in its tracks for the last hundred years or so just north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks, which were pushed through in the 1890s.

The 1938 hurricane breached the Napeague isthmus and others, such as Carol in 1954, have breached it since.

The array of remnant coastal ponds along the south shore between Shinnecock Bay and the Double Dunes east of Hook Pond in East Hampton Village were probably all connected in one big water body, which extended along a broad front. They were gradually isolated by onshore dune processes that created the Double Dunes and the lower dunes stretching from East Hampton Village in the east all the way to Agawam Lake at the foot of Southampton Village.

Napeague and the rest of Amagansett’s oceanfront grew out into the ocean for hundreds of years as sands came on shore and blew up into the dune field, creating several rows of dunes, the oldest of which have come to rest on the north side of Bluff Road and the farm fields and building lots to the east of Indian Wells Highway. Thus, the name Double Dunes is a misnomer, as there were also tertiary and quaternary dunes created early on. A new primary dune may be in the offing should more sand be deposited on that stretch of beach, but it is highly unlikely with the current accelerating sea level rise. 

Where there are north-south trending “valleys” along the ocean shores — such as that through Two Mile Hollow Road northward from the ocean parking lot in East Hampton Village to Further Road, then north again by way of Cross Highway to Montauk Highway — coastal storms through the ages have blown sand through them all the way to north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks, where you can still find dune sand overlaying much older soil.

In western East Hampton Village the same phenomenon took place over time; sand moved all the way north of Montauk Highway, for example, to where there is a ridge of high land just west of the Route 114. Amagansett’s shoreline and that to the west have hardly lost any sand in the last 50 years or so, while the Montauk Peninsula’s Fort Pond Bay shore west of the west groin to Montauk Harbor has lost more than 300 feet since the 1930s as measured by the National Coast and Geodetic Survey from aerial photographs.

The Montauk Lighthouse, now a national historic landmark, was situated on Turtle Hill at the very end of the 18th century, more than 200 feet from the water’s edge. Today, the lighthouse stands less than 40 feet from the bluff on average. The loss of almost 200 feet of fast land since its construction, or about one foot per year, is used as a rule-of-thumb measure of the rate of coastal erosion in Montauk. That rate has been doubling rapidly. In some spots, for example Cavett’s Cove, where the bluffs are not protected by any sort of barrier, the landward edge is retreating at the rate of three to five feet a year. A mile west of Cavett’s Cove, a parcel that extended 340 feet to mean high water south from the end of South Surfside Avenue in 1928 was 220 feet from mean high water in 2013. In other words, the bluff line from Ditch Plain on the east to South Surfside in downtown Montauk has been eroding at an average of approximately 1.6 feet per year.

One merely has to visit by boat the south end of Gardiner’s Island to see Cartwright Shoal, called Cartwright Island on some maps, to see how sea level rise is drowning bits of land in the Peconics. The spit to Fort McKinley, now a pile of rubble, on the north end of Gardiner’s Island has long disappeared under water. Spits that go under become sandbars. There are other sandbars, which lay off the ocean’s and bays’ shores, that come and go. The one in Block Island Sound that was a few hundred yards off the beach for several years has disappeared. Most of those along the ocean shore have either been carried off by coastal storms or come ashore.

The so-called barrier beach running from the west side of the Shinnecock Inlet on and off all the way to the Rockaways of New York City has been progressing, or “rolling over,” northward and the only way to stop it in its tracks is to pour more and more sand on it, most of which is pumped on shore from very large dredging barges as is happening now under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers along much of the barrier beach’s length.

As you can see, we are coming and going and almost powerless to stop coastal erosion completely. But with the threat of increasing erosion and sea level rise, if we stop dumping sand on the beach to replace what is lost, Long Island’s future is dim. The only thing protecting Montauk’s downtown area, with its shops, motels, restaurants, and office buildings, is the wall of motels, condos and other buildings situated at the extreme edge of the strip of land a few feet above sea level, if that Maginot Line were to fail, the rest of the downtown area would be up for grabs.

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

With a crowd of about 200 looking on appreciatively in East Hampton High School’s auditorium Saturday morning, the 1989 gymnastics team, the seven McKee brothers, Ed Bahns, Kathryn Mirras, Brynn Maguire, Sandy McFarland, and the late Eleanor Dickinson Baker and James P. McNally Jr. were inducted into the high school’s Hall of Fame.

Kathy Strandberg McGeehan’s conference and league-champion gymnastics team is the third from that year — the others being the state-champion boys basketball team and the state Final Four field hockey team — to have a plaque on the wall.

In addition, it was a back-to-back appearance on the stage for Mirras and Maguire, who had been inducted last year as well, as members of Lou Reale’s 2001 state Final Four softball team.

It was said that the late Eleanor Dickinson Baker, of the class of 1936, would have averaged 45 points per game had today’s basketball rules been in effect in 1934, a year in which her 7-0 team was the state sectional champion, defeating Lindenhurst.

Her son, Dick Baker, said his mother, born in 1918 at Third House in Montauk, led Montauk’s junior high team to three successive undefeated seasons before coming to the high school.

“Can you imagine what travel was like in the 1930s for Montauk athletes to get back and forth, or for their families to attend games?” Baker asked. “The stretch across Napeague wasn’t paved at the time — it was a cinder road.”

And many colleges at the time, he said, didn’t think women should play sports. 

As for girls basketball, “the court was split into halves with three guards in the defensive end, two forwards in the offensive end, and a center who could run the full court. Players were allowed one dribble, and there was no reaching in to take the ball away. That was considered aggressive play. All shots were worth 1 point, and coaches weren’t allowed to speak to their teams during timeouts — only at halftime!”

“When I was growing up we had a backboard and a netless basket hanging off the garage. . . . She would often shoot with us. She shot well and had good range. When I asked my dad why he didn’t join in, he said, ‘I wouldn’t want to be compared to your mother — it wouldn’t come out well for me.’ ”

In speaking about the late James McNally, of the class of 1949, his niece, Colleen, said he’d been an outstanding boxer and guard on the football team that Fran Kiernan said was the best he’d ever had.

His classmates, she said, had established a citizenship award in his name following his untimely death in a motor vehicle accident on July 1, 1949 — an award that is presented to this day.

All the McKee brothers — Dick, Matt, Kelly, Mark, Billy, Brian, and Joey — were honored that day, and their sister, Maureen Marciniak, would have been, too, said their presenter, Bob Budd, “except she didn’t play football for me.”

Combined, the McKees, it says on their plaque, totaled 17 years in varsity football, basketball, baseball, and wrestling competition here, collected 34 varsity letters, have 154 years of coaching experience in the above-named sports, and have volunteered 85 years collectively as T-ball, Biddy Basketball, and youth football coaches in East Hampton and Springs.

Budd said that the late Maureen McKee, when asked how she’d managed to rear such outstanding sons, had replied, “I gave them all the love I had, and when there was no more to give I found some more.”

Joey McKee is East Hampton’s football coach and its junior varsity boys basketball coach, Mark is the athletic director at the Springs School, Kelly McKee assists his younger brother with the football team and is to coach the girls basketball team this winter, Brian McKee coaches wrestling at the Trinity School in New York City, and Billy McKee recently resigned as the boys basketball coach following a successful run.

Concerning the latter, Budd said, “If Larry Brown ever does come to coach here, he’ll have a tough act to follow.” 

Dick McKee, who spoke for his brothers, said their parents told them that if they were ever to receive an award like this they should, first, mention their parents, and, second, not let Mark talk.

The occasion reminded him, said Dick McKee, of the dialogue between Kevin Costner’s character, Ray, and his father after Shoeless Joe Jackson and other departed major leaguers materialized to play a game on the baseball diamond that Ray had built in an Iowa cornfield, having been told, “Build it and they will come.”

“Is this heaven?” his father asked. No, said Ray, “It’s Iowa.” 

Dick McKee said he and his brothers were inclined to make the same connection: to think of heaven and East Hampton in the same breath.

Sandy McFarland Ward (’92), a native of Bridgehampton and a Syracuse University graduate who is an elementary school principal in Concord, N.C., could not make it, though she sent a video in which she spoke fondly of her time here and of the opportunities that sport-sharing had provided her in track and gymnastics. 

Running for East Hampton High, she was a county champion in the 100 and 200-meter dashes and the state runner-up in the 200 in 1991, her junior year, and was fourth in the state 200 in her senior year.

At Syracuse, which she attended on a full athletic scholarship, she competed in indoor and outdoor track. She was the Big East’s indoor 400 champion and still holds the outdoor 400 record there.

Brenda Pinckney, her aunt, accepted the plaque on McFarland Ward’s behalf.

Ed Bahns, a 1973 graduate who was a four-sport athlete at East Hampton (golf, football, basketball, and baseball) before going to Florida Southern on a full baseball scholarship, said it had been a great honor to represent the silver-medal-winning United States baseball team in the 1975 Pan Am Games in Mexico City. 

“Playing for your country, wearing the red, white, and blue, and walking into a stadium filled with 125,000 people . . . it’s beyond words,” the longtime East Hampton coach said.

Bahns won a national championship at Florida Southern, was the team’s most valuable player in his senior year, and was drafted by the Chicago White Sox, in whose organization he played for three years. In his career here he has coached a number of sports — baseball, girls tennis, boys and girls basketball, and bowling.

His family, he said, had always been there for him, a sentiment that he shared with his fellow inductees.

Erin Bock Abran, in speaking about Kathryn Mirras (2004) and Brynn Maguire (2002), said they were exceedingly reliable teammates whom you looked to when the chips were down. 

Mirras, who is now a dentist here, went to the University of Virginia on a full athletic scholarship to play softball. She was an all-state softball player in her senior year at East Hampton. At the 2004 athletic awards dinner, she won the Paul Yuska award, which is given to the senior class’s best female athlete, was named the M.V.P. of the girls soccer and girls basketball teams, and was a recipient of a Kendall Madison Foundation mentoring scholarship.

Maguire, who lettered in field hockey, winter track, and softball here, and who captained the field hockey and softball teams, was a two-time collegiate all-American in field hockey at the University of Mary Washington.

Donna Sennefelder, in speaking for the 1989 gymnastics team, said, her voice catching, that they very much missed one of their teammates, Mary Hadjipopov Sireci, who died in the past year. “We’ll always be with you,” she said. 

Mary Hadjipopov’s award was given to her daughter, Sarah, who was accompanied to the ceremony by her grandparents Henrika and John Conner.

That gymnastics team’s roster included, besides Sennefelder, Jennifer Fuchs, Shannon D’Andrea, Becky Brown, Robin Streck, Dawn Becker, Julie Siegel, Erin McGintee, Tara McGintee, Diane Cooper, Cintia Torres, Penelope Benith, Nicole Starr, Loretta Kom, Stephanie King, Jennifer Brown, Caroline Somers, Yani Cuesta, Cathy Fleetwood, Tara Provini, Namie Trowbridge, and, as aforesaid, Sandy McFarland. 

A tentative 2017 budget for East Hampton Town presented this week by Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell calls for $75.1 million in spending, a 1.8-percent increase over 2016.

The budget relies on $50.4 million in taxes. If it is adopted, the tax levy would increase by 1.3 percent, a hike that is within the state-mandated cap on property tax increases.

Tax rates in East Hampton Town, outside the incorporated villages, would rise by just over 1 percent, to $29.70 per $100 of assessed value. In East Hampton Village and the portion of Sag Harbor that lies within East Hampton Town, rates would decrease by 3.9 percent, setting a rate of $11.25 in taxes to be paid per $100 of assessed property value.

At those rates, the owners of a house in East Hampton Town with a market value of close to $1.7 million would pay $31.90 more in taxes this year; if the property is within village boundaries, the tax bill would go down by $46.20.

For properties outside of the villages with a market value of $678,000, taxes would go up by $12.76; they would go down by $18.48 for properties in the villages.

The spending plan, wrote Mr. Cantwell, includes money to improve lifeguard protection, adding a third lifeguard stand on the downtown Montauk beach, and to post beach attendants at several beaches to keep bathrooms clean and keep litter in check. There will likely be one attendant to cover Indian Wells and Atlantic Avenue beaches in Amagansett, another for the downtown Montauk beaches, and a third stationed at Ditch Plain, Mr. Cantwell said yesterday.

The budget also includes money to hire police officers to replace those who are leaving the town’s employ, and to add a laborer to the Highway Department staff.

Grants to outside civic, social service, and cultural organizations remain largely the same under Mr. Cantwell’s proposed budget for next year. A new $10,000 grant to Meals on Wheels has been proposed, to help the organization avoid cutting back its services, and $4,500 has been added to help the I-Tri youth athletics program pay for relocating its swimming sessions to the pool at Gurney’s Resort when the East Hampton YMCA RECenter, where they normally take place, closes for a time this year for upgrades and repairs.

The budget “reflects salary and benefit costs for existing employees,” Mr. Cantwell wrote in a budget memo. Concurrently, he said, expenses have been brought down through cutting the town’s outstanding debt and through the permanent closure of the scavenger waste plant.

Officials have hewn to a policy over the last several years of retiring more debt than accruing it. The town’s total indebtedness next year is projected to be over $94 million, down from $146 million in 2009.

Debt payments next year will total $12.5 million, representing more than 16 percent of the annual budget. Employee salaries and benefits account for 59 percent of the proposed budget, or $44 million, and other expenditures, the rest.

The town expects to end this year with surplus balances in each of its major budget funds, a factor that has contributed to recent upgrades in East Hampton’s credit rating. Surpluses in the two operating funds are expected to be in the $10 million range, representing surpluses of 37 and 39 percent.

A highway fund will end the year $2.3 million in the black, it is anticipated; the airport fund is expected to have a $1.3 million surplus at the end of 2016, and the sanitation fund is expected to have $1.6 million.

Discussions of the proposed budget will take place at town board work sessions on Oct. 11 and 18, and a hearing, at which the public may offer comments, will be held on Nov. 3. The board is expected to vote on the budget at its Nov. 17 meeting.