Fishing

Want to catch a striped bass? Then Montauk is clearly the place to be right now.

The East Hampton Town Trustees approved a special season and designated areas for harvesting soft clams by a technique known as powering, or churning, last month.

"I'm not sure what I would have done if I were not a fisherman," reflected Capt. Steven Forsberg Sr. of the Viking Fleet in Montauk, the largest privately owned fishing fleet in the Northeast. "I can't see doing anything else. I think I was born with it in my blood." There's probably a good bit of salt water mixed in that blood, too. 

Kim Tetrault, the longtime chief oyster guru at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Marine Center in Southold, tends oysters hatched in late March and scallops still too tiny to be seen without a microscope.

The lead character playing the part of Ahab these days is a commercial lobster diver from Provincetown, Mass., named Michael Packard, and in this updated adventure on the high seas, Packard, while diving near his hometown last week, said he was inhaled by a whale.

Just as there are rules of the road, there are rules of the waterways, and National Boating Safety Week this week is a good time to remember that.

It was a bit of a surprise that I was stopped on the water last Tuesday morning by the Coast Guard for a safety inspection, but it felt good to know they had checked to see that I had all I need to be safe on the water. 

After a fatigue-laden winterlong game of avoiding Covid and basically just staying home (and perhaps listening to too much Pink Floyd), it felt much as if a heavy block of cement had fallen off my shoulders when I finally got back on my boat for the first time since November. It was cathartic and energizing.