Proliferating algae that make it unsafe to even come in contact with the water in certain local ponds, pollution spikes or ongoing high levels of coliform and other bacteria that have caused the closing of bays and harbors to shellfishing and swimming, and threats to the drinking water aquifer have all been traced to phosphorous and nitrogen — or sewage.

To do something about the threats to ground and surface waters that are manifesting themselves ever more frequently, voters will be asked in November to authorize the use of a portion of the community preservation fund for water quality improvement projects. Nancylynn Thiele, a town attorney, presented a draft of a local law that would be adopted, should the referendum pass, to the town board on Tuesday.

“We have this legacy problem that’s going to continue to be there for generations to come. I mean . . . toxic algal blooms in Wainscott Pond, Fort Pond . . . polluted areas that have been closed — Coonsfoot Cove, Accabonac Harbor, the south end of Three Mile Harbor. . . . It’s here, folks,” Town Supervisor Larry Cantwell said at the board meeting.

If approved, the referendum would authorize the use of 20 percent of the revenues coming in to the community preservation fund — money from the 2-percent tax on most real estate transactions that has until now been earmarked only for land and historic preservation — for water quality. It will be the subject of a town board hearing early next month before the Election Day referendum is finalized.

Clean waters and a healthy environment define this community, Mr. Cantwell said, and their degradation will affect residents’ lifestyles, recreation, and the economy. “We need to get started,” he said.

A water quality improvement plan for the town was drawn up by the Natural Resources Department and outlined for the board on Tuesday by Kim Shaw, the department’s director. It calls for a multi-pronged approach to water pollution in projects addressing septic waste, stormwater runoff, agricultural fertilizers, and aquatic habitat improvement.

Under the proposed plan, the allotted portion of the preservation fund could be used in part for a program to help property owners pay to repair septic systems or replace them with the best available technology and for rebates to farmers who implement practices that minimize or prevent the addition of nitrogen into the environment.

Kevin McDonald, the conservation projects manager of the Long Island Nature Conservancy, who also chairs a Peconic Estuary advisory group and the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund advisory board, said a “credit card bill” for waste management that was only “a step above Roman technology” is now coming due, in the form of “red tide, rust tide, brown tide” and their consequences.

“There is virtually no dispute that there’s a problem, and the problem is causing serious consequences,” he said. “All of this is solvable. The town has an opportunity, through an incentive program, to accelerate the means by which that occurs,” Mr. McDonald said. “Frankly, we’re behind,” he said. Kevin McAllister of Defend H2O and Zachary Cohen, the chair of the town’s Nature Preserve Committee, also endorsed the referendum.

More than 60 percent of the wastewater systems in the town are cesspools, Ms. Shaw said Tuesday. “It’s really no treatment at all.”

New septic systems, which the Suffolk County Department of Health Services is expected to approve soon, can remove up to 80 or 90 percent of the nitrogen from effluent before it is released into the environment.

“Many of the problems we have are going to be solved on a site-by-site basis,” Mr. Cantwell said. Particularly promising is technology being developed through which existing septic systems can be retrofitted and improved so that they “virtually eliminate nitrogen” at a reasonable cost, he said.

With grant money secured by the town, several pilot programs, such as a barrier at Pussy’s Pond in Springs, already have been implemented and proven effective, she said. But “we realize it’s just triage at this point. We’re really working from the edge of the water up,” versus dealing with the cause of the problem.

The town has completed studies of the Lake Montauk, Accabonac Harbor, and Three Mile Harbor watersheds, as well as a townwide comprehensive wastewater management plan, all of which provided recommendations for how problems could be addressed, but funding for the large-scale projects had not been found.

 “I think this is the single most important effort that we can make toward environmental protection in the town, since the adoption of the community preservation fund,” Town Councilman Peter Van Scoyoc said Tuesday. “We are in the position of having to deal with legacy issues. We will be able to do that in a very effective way, I think, if the community approves this — without burdening our taxpayers.”

In areas where there is no room on individual properties for improved septic treatment, community or neighborhood-based systems could be installed, according to the town water improvement plan. The plan suggests that the town lead the way by installing advanced systems at municipal facilities, as well as “permeable reactive barriers,” which  physically prevent contaminants from reaching ground or surface waters.

Along with each recommended action, Ms. Shaw said, the town’s plan will include a “rigorous water quality monitoring component” to measure its outcome.

Based on the income the town received from the community preservation fund last year, had 20 percent been available, as now proposed through a referendum, there would have been over $6 million available to address pollution problems, Ms. Shaw said.

Should voters approve extending the preservation fund tax through 2050, which will also be on the November ballot, the projected income would provide up to $152 million for water quality projects.

Besides providing money for water quality improvement, the vote in November is “valuable all by itself,” Mr. Cantwell said, in that an extension of the 2-percent real estate tax for another 20 years, through 2050, could bring in $1 billion for land preservation.

According to a draft law, the town board would be precluded from authorizing projects that “solely accommodate new or additional growth.”

The draft outlines five eligible categories for projects: wastewater treatment improvement, aquatic habitat restoration, pollution prevention, “non-point source abatement and control” programs, and participation in Peconic Bay National Estuary Program projects.

Each project must be included in the town’s action plan and be consistent with one or more regional water quality improvement plans, and meet other specific standards outlined in the law, including compliance with East Hampton’s zoning code and comprehensive plan, especially, Ms. Thiele said, regarding density or possible intensification of a property’s use.

Town Councilwoman Sylvia Overby raised concerns about the law, saying an unintended secondary result of better septic treatment might remove barriers to development. County health approvals based on septic system capacity can now act as a constraint on the development of certain properties, she said. Referring to neighborhood treatment systems, she said they “should be built for the capacity of that neighborhood, now” rather than in a way that would allow more development.

The town’s laws limiting house sizes and maximum lot coverage, would still apply, Mr. Cantwell said, “so I’m not sure that there’s an issue there. Zoning is going to be prevailing here. The same rights that someone has now isn’t going to change.”

If Health Department approval regarding septic treatment is the only impediment to growth, he said, and that growth is unwanted,  the town should reconsider zoning. “If we have areas that are inappropriately zoned, we should be looking at that, and not rely on the County Health Department,” Mr. Cantwell said.

Councilman Van Scoyoc, the sponsor of the law that would modify the C.P.F. program, said the result of any project undertaken with money from the preservation fund “has to be a net improvement to water quality,” and increased density or property use would nullify that.

The draft law calls for the creation of a water quality technical advisory committee to work with the town’s community preservation fund advisory board to review proposed projects and make recommendations to the town board, which would hold hearings on individual projects.

In addition, Mr. Cantwell suggested Tuesday, it is likely that the town would hire a qualified technical expert to oversee the program.

“No new development — you’ll hear that about a hundred times in here,” Ms. Thiele said in presenting the draft law. “But we want to make it absolutely clear that we are not looking to expand the density of development or the population out here.”  

The Springs School District’s search for an architect for the potential expansion of its overcrowded building ended last Tuesday where it essentially began. From among eight architectural firms that responded to the district’s November 2015 request for proposals for a large capital project, officials chose B.B.S. Architects and Engineers, the firm they had brought in to analyze the school’s space needs and complete a number of projects in the 2014-15 school year. It also is the firm that worked for free last summer with the district’s facilities committee to brainstorm solutions to the problem of overcrowding.

No maximum payment was included in the contract because Springs has neither approved a large capital project nor the costs associated with one. Instead, B.B.S. is to be paid 5-percent of a total project’s value. For instance, if a $15 million expansion were approved, the firm would receive $750,000. The full contract was not immediately available.

B.B.S. has also offered to credit back some of the money it earned during the 2014-15 school year, when it was paid $34,000 for certain work. The payment was criticized because the Springs School Board had not entered into a formal contract with B.B.S., which the board has since said was an oversight.

The district tried to do everything above board with this process, Carl Fraser, the district’s interim business administrator, said at the school board’s meeting on July 5.

“I will ask the board and the community to give this process a chance. This recommendation is one that we feel very comfortable with. We feel that this company will do the job that we want,” he said.

B.B.S., which had presented several designs for Springs School expansion in the past, was the lowest bidder and “came across as more experienced and their staff was superior in terms of the work they accomplished,” Mr. Fraser said. “So there was no hesitation on the part of the committee, which unanimously agreed that B.B.S. was the top architect to select.”

B.B.S. was also one of the four firms that submitted proposals when Springs sought an architect in July 2015. Those bids were tossed out in November, when school officials decided to begin a new search.

The selection of B.B.S. drew sharp criticism at the meeting from a resident, Carole Campolo. Ms. Campolo, who managed contracts for New York City for many years, said the bidding process seemed “heavily weighted in favor of B.B.S.” because of the access the firm previously had to the school. She also said she was troubled by the lack of a cap on the dollar amount B.B.S. was to be paid.

“You need to run to C.D.C.H. and get that space,” she said, referring to the building that housed the Child Development Center of the Hamptons, which closed at the end of June. The school board has said it is exploring leasing or purchasing the building as a potential solution to overcrowding.

Barbara Dayton, the school board president, addressed Ms. Campolo’s concern by saying that “passing the resolution doesn’t mean that tomorrow we’re going to go out and start flinging money around. . . . The can has been kicked down the road for a long time. A step like this says we are ready to move forward,” she said.

Anna Throne-Holst, a former South­ampton Town supervisor, was declared the winner of the June 28 Democratic Party primary election to represent New York’s First Congressional District after a count of approximately 1,800 absentee ballots gave her a 317-vote margin over Dave Calone, a businessman, former prosecutor, and former chairman of the Suffolk County Planning Commission. With her win certified on Tuesday morning by the commissioners of the Suffolk County Board of Elections, Ms. Throne-Holst goes on to challenge Lee Zeldin, a first-term Republican, in the Nov. 8 election.

The primary election was too close to call after the count of machine votes yielded a 29-vote lead for Ms. Throne-Holst, out of 10,863 cast. After the count of absentee ballots, Ms. Throne-Holst had won 6,479 votes, or 51.25 percent, to Mr. Calone’s 6,162. Including absentee ballots, just 9.27 percent of the district’s 136,464 eligible voters cast a ballot in the primary election.

An official at the board of elections said last week that 1,811 absentee ballots were counted. Sixteen of those landed in the “scattering” column, a category for miscellaneous write-in votes, in the official result. Any challenges to an absentee ballot from one candidate’s campaign were withdrawn, the official said.

Mr. Calone bested Ms. Throne-Holst in East Hampton, where the four Democrats on the town board as well as the East Hampton Democratic Committee endorsed him, winning 570 votes to Ms. Throne-Holst’s 489. He also won in his hometown of Brookhaven, by a vote of 3,745 to 3,166, and in Islip, where he won by a single vote.

But in Southampton, Ms. Throne-Holst received 1,124 votes to Mr. Calone’s 835. She also won by a sizable margin on Shelter Island and in Riverhead, Southold, and Smithtown.

Her campaign issued a statement shortly before 4 p.m. on Friday, approximately 30 minutes after officials of the board of elections finished counting the absentee ballots but before the vote was certified. “I am deeply grateful to all who placed their trust and support in me, and I am truly humbled by the privilege it has been to get to know, share the concerns, and my message with so many,” she said. “I want to congratulate Dave Calone on a spirited race, and I share in the respect and support he garnered in the district, as demonstrated by the very close margin and the strength of his candidacy.”

“I look forward to working together with Democrats across the district to take back this important seat,” Ms. Throne-Holst said. “Lee Zeldin has shown in every way how out of step and wrong he is not only for Long Island, but for the country.”

Later on Friday, Mr. Calone issued a statement: “We were outspent in this campaign by nearly $1 million and fell short by around 300 votes.  .  .  . That’s a testament to the great Democratic volunteers supporting our campaign across the district.”

He said he would support Ms. Throne-Holst as she looks toward November. “We cannot continue being represented by Congressman Lee Zeldin, one of Donald Trump’s loudest advocates in Washington,” he said. “So I urge people across eastern Long Island to join me in supporting our Democratic nominee, Anna Throne-Holst, to replace him this November.”

Mr. Zeldin’s office also issued a statement on Friday. It touted passage of his bills to assist veterans and preserve Plum Island from development, and his support of commercial fishermen and for local control of East Hampton Airport. “First Congressional District voters are smart enough to sort fact from fiction and reject all of the false, negative, and partisan attacks on our congressman being spun up by the Democrats,” the statement read.

A closely contested election is expected. The Rothenberg and Gonzales Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter covering political campaigns, calls the First District race a “tossup/tilt Republican.” In an article last Thursday, CQ Roll Call, which reports on Congress, called Mr. Zeldin one of the 10 most vulnerable House incumbents, citing his endorsement of Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and his suggestion last month that President Obama is a racist.

Ms. Throne-Holst will be well funded, the article said, and New York is a blue, or majority Democratic, state. “And yet,” the article continued, “Trump’s appeal shouldn’t be totally written off in this Long Island district.” In New York’s April 19 Republican primary, Mr. Trump won nearly 73 percent of the vote in the First District.

Should Ms. Throne-Holst win the election, she would be the first woman to represent New York’s First district, in a year in which Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, would also represent a first in American history.

Ms. Throne-Holst told The Star last month that she hoped Mrs. Clinton’s coattails would be long enough to carry her to victory. “There’s some synergy there,” she said. “I think we have an excellent chance of winning this in November.”

A proposed 200-seat sports bar at East Hampton Indoor Tennis may be headed for a time out, if five town residents get their way. On June 24, they filed an action with the State Supreme Court in Riverhead against the East Hampton Town Planning Board, which has approved both the bar and the expansion of the sports club, asking the court to annul the decision. All seven members of the planning board are named as defendants.

Scott Rubenstein, the owner of Indoor Tennis, said yesterday he knew nothing about the action and could not comment extensively. “I’ve never been served,” he said. “I wish I had known.” He said the club has been spending money on the planned changes.

The sports bar in question is part of a larger plan, in which two tennis courts on the property at 175 Daniel’s Hole Road would be replaced with a building housing the bar and restaurant, a 10-lane bowling alley, a miniature golf course, and other amenities.

The residents’ challenge calls the planning board’s May approval of the proposal, made after a public hearing at which nobody spoke, “contrary to law” and “arbitrary and capricious.” It attacks the board’s approval on several fronts, first stating that the proposal is a sizable expansion that should require a special permit before it can move forward and questioning a kitchen said to be 1,870 square feet in size.

Noting that the tennis club is in a water recharge district and also in a recreation overlay district, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jeffrey L. Bragman, writes that recreational uses, as defined in the town code, “involve active sporting activities. Permitted uses do not include drinking and eating in a bar and restaurant.”

Further, he writes, the land is zoned residential, which would prohibit a bar and restaurant. Mr. Rubenstein did say yesterday that he believes the entire plan complies with the code.

The filing also questions the idea that the bar and restaurant is a natural extension of a bowling alley as an accessory use. “While the petitioners do recognize that a small bar may be ‘customarily incidental’ to a bowling alley, the applicant has not proposed a small, incidental bar,” it says, going on to call the restaurant “another primary use.”

“The sports bar and lounge will be one of the largest restaurants in East Hampton,” according to the action, which also criticizes the town’s Planning Department, stating that planners focused exclusively on the 10-lane bowling alley and miniature golf course while ignoring the presence of the 200-seat restaurant and the increased traffic it might produce. The residents’ action, formally known as an Article 78 proceeding, also points out that the Suffolk County Planning Commission had said in approving the plan that the East Hampton Planning Board should require a traffic study focusing on South Breeze Drive. The planning board did not do so.

The appeal also challenges the planning board’s “failure” to require sanitary calculations for the bar-restaurant, particularly because of its location in the water recharge district, “where disproportionately large volumes of rain water are recharged and stored in underground aquifers.” Beyond the town’s designation of the site, it is also in a Suffolk County Special Groundwater Protection area, key to East Hampton’s drinking water, the action notes, going on to warn that thousands of gallons of septic flow could result from a 200-seat restaurant with two bars.

The five petitioners, two of whom live on South Breeze Drive, are Joanna Grossman, Marie Zerilli, Barry Raebeck, Stephen Bernstein, and Dominique Weiss.

“I am disappointed,” Mr. Rubenstein said. “Neighbors were aware of what is going on. People have a right to develop their property under the zoning code.”

As of yesterday it did not appear that a judge had been assigned to the matter. The planning board’s chairman, Reed Jones, said that, like Mr. Rubenstein, he was unaware of the action, and declined to comment.

A house believed to be the only surviving 19th century dwelling of a member of the Montaukett tribe is slated for designation as a historic landmark, after a public hearing on the proposal next Thursday.

The 1.7-acre property, near the intersection of Springs-Fireplace Road and North Main Street in East Hampton, is believed to hold the broken-down remains of a residence that was moved from Indian Field in Montauk to the area then known as Freetown. In the late 19th century, Arthur Benson, who owned and developed much of Montauk, offered deeds to plots of land in Freetown to Montauketts, to entice them to vacate their traditional tribal lands.

A number of houses were apparently moved. The saltbox-style house in question, now owned by East Hampton Town, once belonged to George Lewis Fowler and his wife, Sarah Melissa Horton.

Freetown was so called because it was settled by former slaves of wealthy local families. The Fowler house is the only one that remains.

George Fowler worked as a gondolier and gardener for the artist Thomas Moran, whose Main Street, East Hampton, house and studio, a national historic landmark, is being restored. Fowler was also a caretaker at Home, Sweet Home.

His house was moved to Freetown around 1890 and “is possibly one of the most historically significant structures in the Town of East Hampton,” according to town documents.

The history of the area will be the subject of an oral history project, “Mapping Memories of Freetown,” for which those with connections to and memories of the Freetown neighborhood have been invited to the East Hampton Historical Farm Museum, at Cedar and North Main Streets, on Sunday between noon and 5 p.m.  A program at 1 p.m. will include comments by researchers and others.

Allison McGovern, an archeologist and professor at the State University at Farmingdale who has been surveying the museum property (the former Selah Lester farm) for the possible remains of a wind-powered sawmill that was once used by the Dominy family of craftsmen, will be on hand, along with anthropologists, to collect oral histories about the neighborhood, as well as ideas about restoring and interpreting the Fowler house and lot.

A 1790 census reportedly recorded East Hampton’s residents as 1,299 whites, 99 slaves, and 99 people classified as “all other free people,” according to the Center for Public Archeology at Hofstra University.

“The Fowler house completes the picture of the Moran house and Home, Sweet Home,” Robert Hefner, a history consultant to the town, said in a report. “This puts Main Street and Freetown together.”

With its connection to the former Indian Field site in Montauk (now Montauk County Park), and its archeological resources, the Fowler house is also likely eligible for a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, wrote Marguerite Wolffsohn, the town planning director, in a report delivered recently to the town board.

“The house and its property are a valued part of the cultural, historic, economic, and social history of the town,” she wrote. “History tends to record the wealthy and powerful. George Fowler was neither, and we have much less information about the ordinary and poor people in our history. Yet the people who lived in Freetown were the workers who supported the wealthier households in East Hampton Village, Gardiner’s Island, and elsewhere in town. His house and property have the potential to teach us about the lifeways of the Montauketts after they were dispossessed of their homes in Montauk and detribalized by the New York State government. It is a potential interpretive tool for understanding the history of Freetown, which is minimally understood by historians.”

The public hearing on the historic landmark proposal will begin at 6:30 p.m. next Thursday at Town Hall.

A key backer of Soldier Ride here on the South Fork has withdrawn support of the ride this year in light of the recent criticism of the Wounded Warrior Project, the nonprofit organization that is the primary beneficiary of Soldier Ride.

JoAnn Lyles, the mother of Marine Lance Cpl. Jordan C. Haerter of Sag Harbor, who died in the line of duty in Iraq in 2008, said via Facebook on Wednesday that her organization, In Jordan's Honor, will not participate in Soldier Ride this weekend, and she has asked Soldier Ride to remove her son's name from its promotional materials. She attributed her decision to the January news reports from CBS News and The New York Times that said the Wounded Warrior Project lavishly spent donor dollars on its own travel, hotels, and meals, an allegation that the Wounded Warrior Project and the local organizers of Soldier Ride have fervently disputed.

In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Lyles said it was a hard decision to make. "On the local level, I think we still did good, but the Wounded Warrior Project got so big and I think things got out of control," she said. "I think here, where Soldier Ride started, it's still grassroots and everybody volunteers and no one gets paid. . . . People were questioning why I was supporting the Wounded Warrior Project. I do hope they get back on track."

Chris Carney of East Hampton, one of Soldier Ride's founders, called Ms. Lyles's Facebook announcement "distressing," but said it would have been counterproductive to become involved in a social media discussion.

"She is entitled to her own opinion," Mr. Carney said on Friday, the day Soldier Ride took to the streets of Babylon. "I need to focus on the 45 wounded warriors who will be riding down our streets on Saturday morning, and my commitment is to them. I believe in the rehabilitative power of this ride. I've seen it firsthand. And I know our team of volunteers will galvanize to ensure they all get the support and love they deserve."

Ms. Lyles said In Jordan's Honor would continue to raise money for its own scholarship program and support other organizations that help veterans, including Hope for the Warriors and 9/11 Veterans, as well as the Marine Corps Scholarship Fund. She said her team is planning its first-ever Jordan's Run in Sag Harbor on July 30, which was her son's birthday. The 5-kilometer run/walk event is to start at 6 p.m., and will begin and end at Pierson Middle and High School. More details can be found online.

After months of silence and speculation, Guild Hall announced today that Andrea Grover has been named executive director to replace Ruth Appelhof, who is retiring.

Ms. Grover will begin her appointment on Sept. 1. She has been a curator of special projects at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill since 2011. Her most recent curatorial project, "Radical Seafaring," has been well received by critics and audiences and has fostered a new category of contemporary art, "offshore art."

• Related: EAST Magazine Q&A with Andrea Grover

Known for her successful efforts to build communities within East End art circles, as well as in Houston, where she was founder and director of the Aurora Picture Show, she has also served as an adviser for arts foundations such as Creative Capital, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.

She has been a Warhol curatorial fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a Center for Curatorial Leadership fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Ms. Appelhof announced her retirement last year. She will stay in the area to work on several book projects.

It’s difficult to cast a sinker and a hook baited with clam or bunker a long distance. Any attempt to muscle the cast often results in a tangled mess or bait flying wildly off the hook. Figure an average surfcaster can fling lead and bait about 50 yards on a good day. An accomplished surfcaster can send them maybe an additional 50 yards, give or take. If the fish are hanging 75 yards offshore, most anglers can expect a long and frustrating day on the beach. Unless, of course, they own a Sand Blaster Bait Caster, or S.B.B.C. 

The S.B.B.C. is a patented and slick-looking stainless steel casting device that uses compressed air to launch rigged bait through a long tube far into the deep blue sea. Ever been to a ballpark where they use air guns to send promotional items way into the upper deck? Well, it’s pretty much the same concept except the S.B.B.C. sits on the ground and shoots stinky bait instead of a T-shirt. With just a seven-foot rod and a compact tractor battery, a novice surfcaster can toss up to 20 ounces of sinker and bait 300 yards or more, according to the product information and the definitely must-see instruction videos provided on bunkerupfishin.com, the manufacturer’s website. 

The first step in achieving total surfcasting domination with the S.B.B.C. is to place the baited hook, custom sinker, and water in the company’s patented missile-shaped plastic bait mold. The mold can hold up to six baits or any combination of baits and liquefied ground chum. Next, put the mold in a freezer and begin praying that your spouse doesn’t discover the smelly mixture before you remove it. Once frozen into an aerodynamic shape and removed from the mold, the bait, hook, and sinker are ready for send-off.

The S.B.B.C.’s setup appears pretty simple. First, place the fishing rod on rod holders that position it parallel to the launch tube and then open the reel’s bail. Second, power up and start the companion air compressor using the recommended compact tractor battery and charge the compressor’s air tank until the pressure reaches 80 pounds. Third, slide the slippery bait mortar down the launch tube. You are now ready to pull the trigger and hurl the frozen projectile far into the ocean where it thaws and reveals the baited rig. Pretty cool, eh? 

Put aside for the moment the issue of how one feels a bite at the end of 300 yards of line or how to set a hook at such a great distance and just appreciate the genius of this revolutionary $999 product. 

Someone on the East End must buy one! You supply the frozen bunker and I’ll bring the frozen margaritas. Deal? 

Congratulations to Capt. Jake Nessel of the EbbTide out of Montauk, who has been named Fishing Legend of the Year by his peers in the local fishing community. Captain Nessel began his career in the Montauk sportfishing industry in 1955 working as a deckhand on various party boats. He has been the captain of the Marlin5/Ebb Tide since 1996. 

An award ceremony honoring Captain Nessel will take place at the Montauk Grand Slam Charity Tournament 2016, to be held on Saturday and Sunday at Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk. The tournament is sponsored by the East Hampton Kiwanis Club and the Montauk Friends of Erin. Information about the tournament, which awards big prizes to the winners of the recreational, party boat, and commercial/professional divisions, can be had at 631-668-379. All participating children ages 13 and under receive an Optimum Youth Anglers Plaque.

Big striped bass followed bunker into local waters and the Point lit up like a rocket this week. Paul Apostolides at Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reported that fish 30 pounds and more were routinely landed under the Montauk Lighthouse on bucktails throughout the day. The action was furious and nerves as well as braids were frayed as surfcasters stood elbow to elbow on the rocks. No knockouts were recorded. Apostolides noted that the stripers will eventually follow the bunker toward Block Island, as they have in the past, unless the fish decide to enjoy resident sand eels and squid. 

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported several stripers above 30 pounds were taken by surfcasters at Napeague beaches on diamond jigs. Several of his customers nabbed stripers above 40 pounds at Montauk. Bennett added that the combination of an east wind, low pressure, and cool temperatures often precipitates a nice striper bite around this time of year. 

Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor said that one of his customers, John Fischetti, caught a 50-pound striper from his boat off Montauk while another, Klever Oleas, hooked a 44-pound fish from the rocks under the Lighthouse. 

T.J. at Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk said that boat anglers were landing large bass on wire-lined umbrella rigs, parachute jigs, and tubes as well as live-lined eels during the day. Bluefin tuna were spotted in Butterfish Hole by several boats passing through the area, he added.

Fluke fishing is good in the bay, though there are lots of shorts in the mix. Sebastian Gorgone at Mrs. Sam’s Bait and Tackle said an eight-pound fluke was taken around the Ruins. Thirteen-year-old Anni Spacek caught a nine-pound fish around the Shagwound buoy from a sailboat. 

Fluke are biting from Accabonac to Napeague, according to Bennett, and T.J. at Gone Fishing said Montauk’s north rips and south of the radar tower in 80 feet of water are prime spots for consistent keeper fluke fishing. 

Sea bass can be found on the backside of Gardiner’s Island and are biting hard in Montauk, where keeper fish are plentiful.

The Tackle Shop in Amagansett now has a website: thetackleshop.org. Wok ’n’ Roll in Montauk, famous for cooking a fisherman’s fresh catch in the style of his choice, has closed. Maybe another Montauk restaurant can assume this longtime hook-to-table tradition?

The Star’s fishing columnist can be followed on Twitter, @ehstarfishing. Photos of prize catches can be emailed to David Kuperschmid at [email protected].

The Great Bonac Fireworks Show is set for Saturday night, with a top-drawer display to be shot off by Fireworks by Grucci over Three Mile Harbor just after dark.

The show this year will be dedicated to Rossetti Perchik, a Springs resident who died in May. The founder of the Clamshell Foundation, Mr. Perchik stepped in several years ago to sponsor the annual midsummer fireworks display that had been a tradition for more than 30 years, initially as a fund-raiser for the Boys Harbor camp.

When the camp closed, the future of the popular fireworks show was in doubt, as it was again this year. Fund-raising for the cost of the show in recent years was inadequate, and Mr. Perchik had covered the shortfall from his own pocket.

This year, while an online GoFundMe campaign raised more than $16,000, it was a generous contribution from a community member who wished to remain anonymous that salvaged the show.

The Clamshell Foundation, a nonprofit whose main event — a sandcastle contest on Amagansett’s Atlantic Avenue Beach in August — raises money for the group’s contributions to local food pantries, scholarships to high-school graduates, and other causes, agreed to mount the show this year, but will not continue.

The group has promised to help a new sponsor learn the ropes, and Fireworks by Grucci has agreed to continue its help, by providing a national-class display at a reduced rate, in memory not only of Mr. Perchik but also of the late Tony Duke of Boys Harbor, and the late James Grucci, his friend, who is the father of the company’s current president, Phil Grucci.

While residents of the Driftwood Shores development in Springs who have crowded recent meetings of the East Hampton Town Trustees did not attend Monday’s meeting, Rick Whalen, the trustees’ attorney, described an attempt to find out, once and for all, if the trustees have a valid ownership claim to the beach there and with it public access rights above the mean high-water mark.

Driftwood Shores residents have complained that their traditional use of the beach there has been questioned by new owners of a bayfront house who insist the public does not have legal access to the beach above mean high water. The results of the research Mr. Whalen described could have far-reaching consequences.

The trustees do not dispute that current deeds to certain bayfront properties state that private ownership extends to the high-water mark, but Mr. Whalen suspects that demarcation was not in the original conveyances and may therefore be invalid. Fidelity National Title will search the title chain prior to 1958 or ’59 when the Driftwood Shores subdivision map was filed.

“They’re looking for the pre-file map, describing the property fronting on waters of Gardiner’s Bay, for the exact language of the boundary,” Mr. Whalen said. “Does it say to the high water mark, to the water, to the bank, to the cliff?” The chain and a map abstract go back to 1884, he said. “We want to find out, if you go back far enough, do you find that the early conveyances did not go to mean high water?”

The title search will cost $1,800 and take approximately two weeks, Mr. Whalen told the trustees, who voted unanimously for it to proceed. They also voted to allocate an additional $2,000 for a title search to determine if the public has access rights to Wainscott Pond. “Based on what I’m seeing, I’m not as optimistic it will give us an access over that road,” Mr. Whalen said of an unnamed road leading to the pond from the south end of Beach Lane.

“From everything I’ve ever heard, there is no access to the pond,” Francis Bock, the trustees’ clerk, said. “Why don’t we just find out once and for all?”

Otherwise, an update on the effort to combat harmful algal blooms in Georgica Pond was the focus of the unusually quiet meeting. Sara Davison, executive director of the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, a group of property owners, told the trustees that the aquatic weed harvester the group launched in May had removed four pickup-truck loads of macroalgae, blooms that have preceded outbreaks of the cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, which deplete dissolved oxygen and threaten human and animal health. The project is meant to determine if removing macroalgae is effective in combatting cyanobacteria, which has forced the trustees to close the pond to marine harvesting for three consecutive years.

Compared to the last two years, macroalgae growth in the pond has been very slow, Ms. Davison said. “This is a combination of different conditions,” she said, among them “the pond being much fuller, and cooler,” due to a cool spring. Another factor may be a bloom of dinoflagellate, a marine plankton, which has shaded the water, inhibiting photosynthesis, she said.

Landowners on the east and west sides of the pond have provided sites to offload the macroalgae, which is brought to the town’s recycling center for use as compost.

Brian Byrnes asked Ms. Davison if she could predict the project’s efficacy. Not yet, was the answer. “Is this effective in removing nitrogen and phosphorous from the pond? We’ll know at the end of the season” when Christopher Gobler, who the trustees and the Friends of Georgica Pond have engaged to monitor water quality, has completed an analysis. “We’ll report that to you right away,” she said.

Discussion turned to the trustees’ traditional biannual opening of the pond to the Atlantic Ocean, which serves to flush its waters and restore salinity, dissolving cyanobacteria blooms in the process. Jim Grimes said he was troubled that “every time we don’t let this pond, we’re doing an incredible disservice to this environment. I think we should be focusing on making every effort to breach this pond with as much frequency as we can.”

That effort, however, is complicated by federally protected piping plovers and least terns, which nest on nearby beaches, with several plover chicks now in protected areas.  “We want to open it as soon as possible,” Bill Taylor said, “and we want to make sure it’s open in March, before the plover establish themselves.”

The trustees’ task, Mr. Grimes said, is to balance protection of the plovers and terns with the urgent effort to restore the pond to health. To that end, an application to the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation for a permit to dredge the pond is under way.