From the category archives:
I pull up the first pot on a twenty pot run. Tails wriggling, bellies extending, teeth grinding — perhaps three dozen small brown, yellow and black blowfish magically become air and water filled baseballs inside the one-by-two inch galvanized turkey wire trap I built during the winter months.. I pull back the bungee-corded hook, open […]
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Say there was a species of whale shark that was far more common and had developed through the eons of evolutionary history a hybrid form of feeding — rather than filtering plankton and krill through its huge scoop-like mouth and gullet it dragged it’s open lower jaw over the sea bottom in search of particularly […]
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At the end of John’s Gospel Peter gets impatient waiting for the resurrected Messiah to show up with further instructions and goes fishing with the other Apostles. They catch nothing all night. In the morning they see Jesus on the beach grilling fish (where’d He get those?) He tells them to cast the net on […]
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At Work in the Garden of Eat and Be Eaten By Charles F. Tekula, Jr. On dry land nothing’s moving yet, still dark and cold. But in the watery fields the feasting continues. Bluefish dart like lightning in and out of the pods of bunkers that themselves still strain the tiny swimming plankton, even as […]
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In the PBS Nature presentation chronicling the demise of the red knot population, which they said took place precipitously in the 1990’s, they blamed it on the supposedly coinciding drop of the population of spawning horseshoe crabs. It was said that commercial fishermen discovered in that decade that female horseshoe crabs with eggs inside them […]
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Just so you know, there are more fluke (aka summer flounder), more striped bass and more horseshoe crabs near our shores now than anyone alive has ever seen. But in New York the fluke season is closed for both sport and commercial fishermen, the horseshoe crab take is closely controlled and President Bush has moved […]
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As to the “new data” on the percentages of fishing mortality the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is now embracing, and the controversy this is engendering, I’d like to make a few personal observations. My credentials are these – I have been a commercial fisherman all of my adult life, and I am approaching my […]
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2/28/07 At the end of January Newsday reported on the plight of a long successful multi-generational Long Island bayman. As soon as I read about how the Town of Islip and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) had finally run Frank Sloup out of town, I knew it was coming. I just […]
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