Outdoors

These days there are far fewer folks fishing from their boats or from shore in Sag Harbor than there were 30 years ago. This year I’ve probably seen around five boats fishing all season from my vantage point on Shelter Island Sound.

Before you know it, it’ll be the middle of October, when the season for blackfish begins. So I canceled my regular morning of tennis to take an early drive to Montauk to fish for fluke and sea bass aboard the Simple Life.

I'm ashamed to admit that I've done very little fishing this season. But I have a good reason.

Last week, Capt. Rich Jensen, who keeps a charter boat at Orient, did something different. He had an open date and took some friends and family out on the water to catch and release sharks.

On Sunday, I took four of my friends on the water with Capt. Rob Aaronson of the charter boat Oh Brother. It was my first time fishing out of Montauk this season, and it was good to be back home.

It’s a great tradition. The popular Montauk Grand Slam charity fishing tournament — now in its 25th year — will once again be held this weekend at Uihlein’s Marina on West Lake Drive.

I’ve received an unusual number of emails questioning my Russian heritage.

On the local fishing scene, things are heading into summer mode, but the fishing has been productive on many fronts.

The iconic movie that premiered in the summer of 1975 and scared swimmers away from the water will once again come to life when Capt. Pat Mundus, daughter of the famed shark hunter Capt. Frank Mundus, will speak at the Cutchogue Library on the 50th anniversary of the film.

It hadn’t been docked since late November after she conked out just southwest of Big Gull Island. Now my Rock Water is back in the water at her berth in Sag Harbor Cove.

It’s best to buy fish and shellfish that are locally captured and in season here. Consumers need to be smart if they truly desire freshness.

I relocated the cages of my juvenile oysters to my next-door neighbor’s dock here on the east side of North Haven, where the current runs swift. Oysters grow fast and plump in strong tidal flow.

It felt like getting whacked in the forehead by a two-by-four. The dramatic increase in the population over Memorial Day weekend was staggering.

Built nearly 25 years ago in Arichat, a small village on Isle Madame off Cape Breton Island in eastern Nova Scotia, the Rock Water is a stout craft and has served me well over the years. But my luck finally ran out last year, and it seemed everything was breaking down on a weekly basis. First was the demise of my fish finder, followed by my GPS/radar. Then the oil cooler went kaput. Next to die was the alternator.

The news I read from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a few weeks ago made me recall great times pertaining to the most iconic fish in the world.

While my boat is still shoreside, I want to remind motorboat owners that as per 2025 law they need to attend and pass a New York State safe-boating course.

Like the passing of Vincent (Butch) Maher, whom I wrote about last week, I was equally saddened to learn of the recent loss of Helen S. Rattray. She was a local legend in so many ways.

“All gardens are a form of autobiography,” said the late, great Bob Dash, who began ‘writing’ his own into the soil of Sagaponack in 1967 — a story those at the Madoo Conservancy have continued in the dozen years since Dash’s death and the four decades the public has been welcomed into his two-acre botanical sanctuary.

If you have explored natural approaches to gardening, you may have heard of biodynamics. Depending on how it’s described, it can sound either mystical or based on ancient farming wisdom.

There it was: the moment the Garden Book editor became a gardener herself.

In the Victorian-era school of thought known as “the Language of Flowers,” wisteria is associated with romance, beauty, and devotion, with a slightly ominous postscript referencing the plant’s twisting vines and warning of loving something a little too much, lest it be suffocated.

Floral arranging and gardening have been Lilee Fell’s synergistic passions since childhood. As the owner of Lilee Fell Flowers in Sag Harbor, she grew up watching her mother create floral arrangements for garden club flower shows and her grandmother making arrangements for their church’s altar guild.

Concerned Citizens of Montauk is urging home gardeners and professional landscapers alike to stop adding synthetic fertilizer on their lawns, flower beds, and vegetable gardens.

Despite keeping fishing notes in my logbook since 1975, I can’t precisely determine the exact date I first met Vincent (Butch) Maher, but I do know it happened at some point in May of 1986, according to my haphazard writings, when I climbed aboard the Lazybones.

Georgia O’Keeffe once said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment.” In the spirit of the pioneering modernist painter’s hope to give that world to others, The Star spoke with two local anthophiles about extending the ‘moment’ of both store-bought and hand-harvested bouquets.

“There’s been some pretty significant glimmers of hope — only to have our hopes dashed again,” Peconic Baykeeper’s executive director, Pete Topping, said at the start of a panel discussion the group hosted in December on this year's scallop season and prospects for the future.

Despite a few precious bay scallops being dredged from Lake Montauk, the season has been a total bust just about everywhere on the East End since it opened in early November.

There is one tradition of Thanksgiving that I miss even a decade later. My good friend Wayne Clinch of Montauk used to organize consecutive fishing charters on the Friday and Saturday after Turkey Day.

For a vast majority of anglers, the fishing season has come to an end, as persistent cold winds out of the north have taken a firm hold. But the bass fishing has been great off the ocean beaches and the blackfish action has been excellent.

The Star's fishing columnist has taken his boat out of the water for the season, but on the fishing scene, the action remains solid, especially for striped bass and blackfish.