It was time. 

Early Saturday morning, after sitting silently at my dock for almost three weeks due to the incessant cold and windy weather, my boat was finally freed from the dock lines for the first time this season. Mind you, while the sun was strong and clear over the now-bright eastern horizon, the temperature was still a very chilly 35 degrees dockside and there was a noticeable breeze whistling from the northwest. It felt well below freezing. Spring was not here, even if the calendar said so. 

But I was restless and frustrated by the lack of any good weather windows. I needed to give my 30-foot Nova Scotia-built fishing boat a chance to stretch her sea legs, as they say. The boat itself is a tank. It was constructed in the very small seaside town of Arichat on Isle Madame, a very tiny island located to the east of Cape Breton Island, where French Acadian is still spoken by many of the locals. It was built over 15 years ago and has proven to be a very reliable, stout craft that can take on just about any kind of sea. On Saturday, it needed to be run, no matter the conditions.

However, there was another reason to get away from the dock, and that was to finally set my lobster gear out for the season. Due to a variety of time-laden work commitments, long hours, intense deadlines, and some extensive travel in the U.S. and abroad in my previous professional career, I had not set my well-worn traps for nearly nine years. It was far too long, but I just did not have the time. 

While they had been collecting weeds and various vines, and two even had a modest-size locust tree growing through them, the 36-inch traps were still in pretty good shape when I unearthed them from the far distant corner of my marina a few weeks ago. They could still fish, plus I had bought a few used ones last fall in case my original traps failed.

That said, they did require a bit of repair, including re-twining some of the parlor heads, replacing a good number of elastic latches that hold the entrance of the lobster traps together, scraping and painting buoys, repairing a few bottom runners, and replacing the trawl lines on more than half of them. 

I spent a few days bundled up in the chilly wind over the past few weeks getting the gear up to snuff, but it felt good to do that again after so many years. I realized I had missed it very much. It was therapeutic in so many ways, despite my newly chafed and sore hands.

However, there was one final snag: I had no bait for my traps. Due to the extended, unseasonably cold weather, there has been a late start of the fishing season, which resulted in an acute scarcity of various kinds of bait and fish (bunker is the primary choice of those few who still trap for lobster), as many commercial box trap fishermen have not had a chance to set their poles and nets in the bays due to the lousy weather.  

Over the past week or so, I made a few calls to some fishing contacts and bait stores and all had the same monotone response: no bait. A final call to Ken Morse at Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor was my last hope.

“I’ve been trying to get bait, but it’s been very difficult to get the dealers UpIsland to make a visit to the East End,” he said in frustration. A day later, Morse called me with good news. He was to receive a shipment of bunker the next day and asked how much I needed. 

It took about an hour to reach the lobster grounds, where we were greeted by several harbor seals playfully rolling around in the 42-degree water. While seals are incredibly cute, cuddly, and have warm endearing eyes that just about everyone falls in love with, I recalled from earlier seasons that they have absolutely no issue eating through the tough twine that surrounds the funnels to the traps where the bait (and hopefully some lobsters) are encased. Seals are not stupid; they love an easy meal and lobster is a favorite item on their menus. That said, the traps were dropped overboard and I hope in a week when I check on them, we may be fortunate enough to enjoy a fresh lobster dinner. 

On the fishing scene, action in many areas remains slow and angler participation minimal. The season for porgies starts on Tuesday and fluke fishing commences three days later. While striped bass season opened on April 15, action for the popular fish has been scattered at best. Those who love their fried calamari are waiting for the spring run of squid, which should begin in the next two weeks. 

“Things are fairly quiet on both forks,” said Scott Jeffrey, owner of East End Bait and Tackle in Hampton Bays. “A few bunker pods have been passing through the Shinnecock Canal for the past few weeks. A couple of flounder were taken in the canal and some schoolie stripers are in the back creeks of the Peconics. That’s been about it.”

Out at Montauk, the saltwater scene has been extremely quiet, as many boat owners are still getting their respective boats out from their winter of deep hibernation wrapped under heavy plastic coverings.

At the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, the owner, Harvey Bennett, was more enthused. He had good news from both salt and freshwater. “I got a report that some schoolie bass showed up at Cartwright Shoals at the south end of Gardiner’s Island on Saturday,” he said. “I also heard rumors of porgies in Fort Pond Bay and a few rat stripers at Montauk Point.”  Bennett was more excited over the freshwater action going on in various local ponds.

“Freshwater fishing has been hot in Montauk and other ponds,” he said, pointing to largemouth bass and big carp, and perch at Hook Pond in East Hampton, and pickerel at Scoy Pond in Northwest Woods.

And if you have a desire to see one of those lobster-loving seals, the Viking Fleet has scheduled several seal-watching trips. The next one is Saturday, when the Viking Superstar will depart at 1 pm. The fare is $40 for adults and $25 for children. Reservations are requested.

We welcome your fishing tips, observations, and photographs at fish@ ehstar.com. You can find the “On the Water” column on Twitter at @ehstar- fishing.

The South Fork is contracting and expanding at the same time. Its land volume is slowly shrinking as the seas warm up, and sea level rise pushes farther and farther inland with each tropical storm or northeaster. At the same time, its population continues to rise as its resort popularity grows. Traffic on the three east-west thoroughfares east of the Shinnecock Canal continues to expand. At the end of the last millennium it was barely tolerable, now it has become intolerable.

Where would we be without the passage of the community preservation act in 1998, which gave the five townships on the Peconic Bay estuary a new funding mechanism for land preservation? We preserved much land before the passage of the act by hook or by crook, and much more since its inception, especially here on the South Fork with its ultra rich real estate purchases. But we are far from finished.

One strategic system of land that still needs to expand is the Long Pond Greenbelt, a system of ponds, brooks, wetlands, and uplands between Sag Harbor and Montauk Highway. It just may be the richest set of water table ponds and streams east of the Shinnecock Canal. If we include the contiguous land south of the highway, i.e., Sagg Swamp and Sagg Pond, it represents more than eight square miles of preserved land owned collectively by Southampton Town, Suffolk County, and the Nature Conservancy.

The Dongan Patent gave all of Southampton Town’s waterways to the townspeople in 1686, 100 years before we took the rest of the land from the British by way of the Revolutionary War. The list of ponds is exhaustive. Otter Pond on the north, Sagg Pond on the south, with no fewer than 19 other ponds scattered between them. The largest of them, Long Pond, smack in the middle, gave rise to the name of Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt, the volunteer organization focusing its environmental and educational activities to the benefit of this natural system, while the Southampton Town Trustees manage the ponds, and streams running from them.

Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt was started two years before the new millennium and has been actively working to protect the system ever since, without skipping a beat. Dai Dayton and Sandra Ferguson have led the group since its inception. For the past several years they have been meeting and conducting weekly activities at the nature center owned by Southampton Town hidden away in the woods of the greenbelt east of the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike.

When I was a professor at Southampton College in the 1970s, I applied for a  National Science Foundation grant to survey the system of ponds making up the greenbelt, but was unsuccessful. However, one of my students, Russell Hoeflich, studied the system, particularly with respect to its bird species. He later became director of the South Fork-Shelter Island Nature Conservancy and continued the work. I spent many a day with Russell examining the flora and fauna of this wonderful area.

The late Pierson Topping, a trapper and wildlife observer, once trapped a mink at the edge of one of the ponds. To many a Bridgehampton and Pierson High School kid, including the environmentalists Pat Trunzo and Chris Chapin, the greenbelt was the place to go to find frogs and turtles and catch bass and pickerel. It was a spot where Mr. Chapin found his first eastern tiger salamanders, a species that has become so rare on Long Island and the rest of New York State that it is now considered endangered.

In the late 1970s, as interest in preserving the rest of the greenbelt grew, Joyce Burland, then a Suffolk County legislator, introduced legislation to help protect the greenbelt. Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., a Pierson High School and Southampton College graduate, has helped the greenbelt in a great many ways.

All of the waterways in the greenbelt represent the top of the upper glacial aquifer. They are groundwater at the earth’s surface, and they rise and fall with alternating wet and dry periods. In the famous drought of the 1960s several of the ponds, including Poxabogue and Little Poxabogue Ponds, dried up. Their only source of water is rain and snow. The groundwater “divide,” the very top of the aquifer, is situated on the north end of Crooked Pond. After a heavy rainfall, one can actually observe the water moving north into Long Pond from Crooked Pond. 

Indeed, Long Pond served as a source of early Sag Harbor’s potable water supply. Some of the trappings of the old waterworks structures are still seen south of Long Pond today. Today, Sag Harbor’s water comes from Suffolk County Water Authority wells situated along the village’s southeast border.

The tiger salamander is just one of the many rare animals and plants in the greenbelt. There are several rare plants including three different insectivorous plants and the pink tickweed, Coreopsis rosea, which comes and goes with the recession and flooding of the shoreline as water levels drop and rise, depending upon the year.

Jean Held once found and photographed a red-bellied turtle, considered alien, but I think native, laying eggs in the middle of the old Long Island Rail Road swath, which was covered with rails when trains ran to Sag Harbor from Bridgehampton. There are northern water snakes, bass, alewives, and eels among the many fish species inhabiting the ponds, and a great number of water birds that come and go, while a few nest. Osprey feed in the ponds and, lately, bald eagles have been seen in the trees at the edge of Long Pond or flying over it. Go there in April in the evening, and you will hear thousands of spring peepers peeping, and after a rain, the trill of many, many gray tree frogs.

Several years ago Jean Held devoted an entire summer to rooting out the phragmites from the northern end of Long Pond by hand with simple tools, but she recently told me this invasive species is still in force. There are a few bald cypresses at the edges of two of the ponds. They are southern coniferous species that occasionally reach to north of New Jersey. A few days ago she went to survey the scene. The little dam at the top of the brook was filled with mud, a freshly dead white perch was on the downstream side of the dam, and two dead male eels were on the upstream side. The upper and last several yards of the stream bed contained no water.

There are some large privately owned tracts in the vicinity of the ponds, which hopefully will never be developed but instead acquired for public use. South of Montauk highway and north of Sagg Swamp there is a big piece of agricultural land with “For Sale” signs. Go into Sagg Swamp a little way to the south of that piece and you run into the easternmost grove of Atlantic white cedar, another rare species on Long Island. The next nearest stands of this majestic tree, the wood of which lasts just about forever, are in the hamlet of North Sea near Little Fresh Pond.

Long Pond and Jeremy’s Hole, in Sagg Swamp, have supported alewife populations in the past. Jeremy’s Hole gets its seasonal run from Sagg Pond. Long Pond gets its via Ligonee Brook, which runs north into Payne’s Cove, which joins with Upper Sag Harbor Cove, which runs under the Route 114 bridge out into the bay. For the last several years, alewives have had a difficult time navigating Ligonee Brook. The culverts under Brick Kiln Road and the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike are not conducive to an easy up-and-down to and from Long Pond. The sides of Ligonee Creek southeast of the latter culvert are unvegetated and erosively scarred, which is not good for the health of the brook.

Common eels, which are no longer common, grow up in Long and Crooked Ponds from four-to-five-inch-long elvers, which make the journey up Ligonee Brook from the Peconic Estuary after a 1,000-mile trip up the coast from the Sargasso Sea out in the Atlantic north of the Caribbean islands. When the eels have matured, they move back down the brook and make their way out to the bays and around Montauk Point and all the way back to the spawning grounds from which they came. No easy trek, mind you. The females, two or three times larger than the males, go separately, the males go in large groups. 

Recently there has been talk of building an asphalted surface and creating a vehicle-impound area in the old former Sag Harbor landfill on the east side of the turnpike just north of the Long Island Power Authority’s high-tension electric line serving much of western Southampton and western East Hampton. Inasmuch as one pond, Deer Lick, makes up part of that area and since that spot to be paved and occupied with old vehicles is in the center of the greenbelt’s tiger salamander population, it is a bad idea. 

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

Driving along a wood-edge road recently, you may have noticed a small tree, almost leafless but with many white quarter-size flowers. The smooth shad is in bloom. It's not as common as its sibling species, Canada shad or shadblow, which blooms a week or so later and is common in sandy habitats such as those along the Napeague stretch. As with most of our deciduous trees, the flowers precede the leaves.

Three weeks ago when I pulled into the driveway of my house in Noyac I noticed that violet periwinkle flowers carpeted much of the front yard, while only a day or two earlier only a few could be seen. On April 23 I looked out my bedroom window and saw the first lesser celandine in bloom. Two days later on a trip to Riverhead, a side road there was covered with their bright yellow blooms. I reckoned that the ones in my yard and the Riverhead ones bloomed at about the same time. Celandines are buttercups, and buttercups, whether native or Eurasian, bloom in early spring as a rule. 

The clockwork precision with which certain flowering plants burst into bloom is one of the great mysteries of the natural world. Whether spring is cold and somewhat snowy, as this year’s was, or warm and dry like some of those in the past, certain flower species bloom at about the same time year in and year out. Obviously, day length, also known as photoperiod, has something to do with this phenomenon, but so does a plant’s genetic makeup.

The same goes for the leafing out of hardwood trees. Of our common ones, maples, in particular the red maple, are the first to flower and leaf out. Norway maples, along with the smooth shad, are next in line. The oaks should be along soon, especially those in the black oak group, such as our common black and scarlet oaks.

Occasionally, the weather is so different that trees, shrubs, and wildflowers bloom out of season. For example, some forsythia bushes started blooming in last year’s warm December. I wondered if those same forsythia bushes would bloom again come early spring, when their yellow flowers usually pop out. They did!

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did the robins, blackbirds, ospreys, piping plovers attune their returns to the first signs of spring, namely the greening of grasses, the flowering of white flowers in the cabbage family, the little piles of digested dirt covering a grassy sward that point to active earthworms? 

Henry David Thoreau kept track of the coming and going of plants while living next to Walden Pond. Before him, John James Audubon painted every single bird that came his way. Primitive people without calendars kept track of the comings and going of the seasons using similar clues. For centuries farmers and fishermen have relied on such signs to guide their efforts throughout each year.

By now we know that wildlife, too, keep track of the seasons, especially outside the tropics, where the seasons are very well demarcated. Migrations of birds, fish, marine mammals, and some terrestrial mammals, like caribou, are dependent upon knowing the signs of the seasons.

As we move further and further into the postindustrial era, and simultaneously become more and more intrigued with and dependent on artificial intelligence, we find ourselves in a mishmash state, warring with one another, over-indulging, moving passively along to the tune of societal pressures, which come and go and ceaselessly change almost as if overnight. The truth is, we are seriously out of whack, and unless we stop and not only smell the roses but count them as well, we and society will become wackier and wackier and ultimately pass out of existence.

Look and listen to the birds and plants in your yard. Each year they appear, either fly in, pop up, or leaf out. They do this effortlessly and without the help of glyphosate and industrialized fertilizers. Each year without exception, the birds in the yard and elsewhere, pair up, build nests, lay eggs, raise young and fledge them, seemingly effortlessly. If ever they should try to change their basic living habitats, it would spell doom. Sure, they adjust to our fancies, take our nuts and grains when it’s cold and convenient, drink from, and bathe in our birdbaths, but they never lose track of their primary being, their number-one way of sustaining themselves, which is written indelibly into their very DNA.

We can learn more from them than they can learn from us.

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

For those who enjoy being on the water, there are usually two distinct and different classes of yachtsmen. You are either one who enjoys being behind the wheel of a powerboat or one who would rather hoist the mainsail for a leisurely cruise that only a sailboat can offer. It’s rather rare to find people who stride to both starboard and port on this matter. But that’s not always a hard and fast rule.

My former neighbor, Jimmy Smythe, the longtime owner of the Corner Bar in Sag Harbor, had both a large sailboat he had inherited from his father and a rather small center console fishing boat. He loved both of them. Jimmy Buffett, the accomplished musician down the beach from me, has an armada of large and small motor and fishing boats, but also owns a beautiful Maine-built sailboat that he likes to take out on a late summer evening cruise, many times by himself. Sailing away to Margaritaville, perhaps?

For me, I’ve primarily landed with the powerboat alliance, but that has not been always the case. Growing up, in addition to a 21-foot Dyer powerboat, my family owned a small Sunfish sailboat that we kept on our beach. We sold the sailboat to a neighbor after my father passed away when I was 7 years old. About five years later, I clamored to my mother about wanting to get a new Sunfish to accompany my 12-foot Sears aluminum boat. It took a bit of persuasion, but she finally relented.

It was a sailboat that was also rather unmistakable in its outward appearance. It was bright orange and red, not exactly my favorite combination of colors, but my mother wanted to ensure she could easily spot me on the water at just about any distance. Being 12, I had very little leverage in the negotiations. Nonetheless, I was thrilled to have it. Ironically, on my very first trip, I unexpectedly caught a gust of wind and did not react quickly enough to let out the sail. The boat tipped over and I was in the water. It happened so fast. I was shocked, but immediately stood on the centerboard and righted the shallow-drafted craft in a few seconds. I never tipped the boat again after that. 

I kept the Sunfish for probably 15 years before I finally sold it on WLNG’s “Swap and Shop” weekly morning garage sale radio show. For the past few years, I look back and regret selling the sailboat. I miss it. While I love my regular fishing boat for multiple uses, I now have more time on my schedule to enjoy the solitude of letting the sail out and taking in the sights and sounds that only a sailboat can offer. 

Scouring the classifieds of various publications and websites, I’ve been keeping my eye out for a sailboat. What kind will it be? I’m not totally sure yet. It will be larger than my original Sunfish, but not so large that it takes more than one person to handle. Best to keep it simple. But I do look forward to one day re-establishing my love of sailing with my own boat. As long as you are on the water, it’s just fine to appreciate both sail and power. 

On the fishing front, the improved weather is bringing more anglers to the surf line and their respective boats. And with both porgy and fluke season opening this week, the activity along the docks will increase even more as anglers dig out their gear from a winter of hibernation.

“There was some good action earlier in the week on school-sized striped bass along the ocean beaches near East Hampton,” reported Ken Morse, proprietor of Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor. “There are now lots of bunker coming into all of the bays as well, but the water is still cold for this time of the year. I also got a report of some good winter flounder action near the Shinnecock Canal along with many throwbacks. That in itself was great to hear.”

Out at Montauk, many captains are getting their boats ready for the season. Porgies and fluke will be on the immediate menu, but a few codfish can still be found a bit farther offshore.

“We did a trip the other day and we had a few cod,” said Capt. Michael Potts of the Bluefin IV charter boat. “The waters are still cold and I did not see much life on the various pieces we fished, despite seeing a large number of whales in the area.” Potts noted that the warming waters should also help push striped bass closer to the rips off of Montauk Point. They have already been caught in rather good numbers toward the western part of Long Island. “The draggers are also getting fluke and porgies close to shore so there should be some good fishing on that front, too, when it opens.”

At the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, the owner, Harvey Bennett, continued to be enthused about the freshwater fishing scene. “The action has been really good in many ponds,” he said. “Fort Pond in Montauk continues to be a hot spot with a number of nice fish, including carp up to 30 pounds. Now that’s some kind of big fish.” Bennett also reported that school-size striped bass can be had from various ocean beaches, including Mecox and Ditch Plain, and from the shore near Rocky Point.

“Also, on Saturday, there was a huge school of bait, fish, and birds working off of Albert’s Landing out to the southern tip of Cartwright Shoal,” he added. “Given the timing, I think it must have been a bunch of early-runner bluefish. It’s about the right time for them to show up.”

“Some stripers are on the ocean beaches as well in the back bays and creeks,” said Sebastian Gorgone of Mrs. Sam’s Bait and Tackle in East Hampton. “Given the warm weather on tap, the activity on several fronts should really pick up. Plus, we should also see some spring squid showing up in Three Mile Harbor and Fort Pond Bay any day.”

All of a sudden, the trees along our back roads have burst into bloom. The black and scarlet oaks were in full flower by Friday evening. As of Sunday dogwoods were just beginning to leaf out, the lowbush blueberries and huckleberries that make up the bulk of the shrub layer are leafing out and blooming simultaneously. 

For those among you who say that the deer are eating up the understory, drive through along Sagg Road, Swamp Road, or Two Holes of Water Road and you will see seas of green two to three feet high. The understory has survived the winter and the deer exceedingly well.

By the weekend the Napeague shads and Long Beach beach plums should be blooming snowy white. Then come the white dogwood flowers, followed by the pinkish white mountain laurels. If you are lucky, you may still find a few bird’s-foot violets in flower, say along Old Northwest Road and maybe even a blue lupine or two among them. Twenty years ago, East Hampton’s side roads were resplendent at this time with these two flowers, but these are modern times and most of them have left us.

If you have oaks in your yard that are not blooming, chances are they are white oaks. They are the last local hardwood trees to bloom and leaf out. And let us not forget those who have lost their pitch pines to the southern pine beetle. Fortunately, the tighter-barked white pines of Northwest have not succumbed. They will expand their range in the absence of competition from the other.

One of the first wildflowers to bloom in Montauk is the trout lily. Victoria Bustamante has been keeping track of the population east of Lake Montauk. They don’t bloom every year, which is probably a good thing because their showy presence would give them away to the hungry herbivores come spring. Lilies come before orchids, which don’t start blooming until late June or July. 

Most of the spring migrants have arrived by now. Terry Sullivan had a male rose-breasted grosbeak in his yard on Monday. Baltimore orioles should be back in a day or two, and the spring warblers, as many as 15 different species, should be passing through any minute now. At least eight species are known to breed here.

In two more weeks I will make my annual nighttime count of whippoorwills. They may be making a comeback if last year’s count is any indication. You hear them, but you rarely see them; listen for a chuck-will’s-widow among them. Each year at about this time, Stephanie Krusa goes to the end of Navy Road at the east end of Hither Woods in Montauk to listen. She is rarely disappointed, at times hearing as many as three different whippoorwills calling at the same time.

Birds that one rarely hears locally these days are wood thrushes, nighthawks, wood pewees, hermit thrushes, ruffed grouse, bobwhites, barn owls, and pheasants. Thank God, the male woodcocks still do their romancing at night over the Montauk grasslands in April, but I haven’t seen or heard one for many a moon.

The run of elvers and alewives is pretty much over for the year. I have yet to smell the oil scent from schools of bunkers in Noyac Bay this year, but then again I don’t smell wafting odors like I used to.

On a rainy night more than a week ago I got a call from fellow naturalist and resident of Sag Harbor, Chris Chapin. Listen, he said, and I did: nasal “cronk” after nasal “cronk” after nasal “cronk” nonstop into the night. The spadefoot toads that live near him were in the nearby recharge basin, finally up and calling after several years’ absence.

Let me know what’s going on in your neighborhood. 

May is my favorite month, have a good one.

The calendar says it’s April, but on many days in the past few weeks, it still feels like midwinter. 

The Easter Bunny has moved on, yet we witnessed more snow on Monday morning to cover up a few premature daffodils poking up from the ground in my neighborhood. I’m beginning to wonder when I will actually cut my still-brown lawn for the first time. It’s been pretty darn depressing to say the least. Alas, the weeks continue to move forward and certain things need to be done, including preparing my boat for the season, despite the lousy weather. 

But another problem loomed on the horizon. Like the ospreys returning to their intricate nests like clockwork on St. Patrick’s Day, I also know to expect a call or email every March from the owner of the marina in Sag Harbor where my boat is docked and stored. The communication is usually pretty direct and predictable: He has uncovered several problems with my vessel that need to be addressed before it is to be dunked in the chilly waters. And every year it’s something different.

The email I received last Monday was a bit more ominous and vaguely scary: “Jon, are you around? There are some things on the boat I would like to discuss.” Discuss? It sounded more like a doctor preparing you for a negative medical report. 

The five-minute drive into town brought many scenarios into my follicle-challenged head. What was it this time? 

Last March, I had a lengthy and costly repair to a forward cabin window that had developed a rather significant leak. Two years ago, it was a major hydraulic steering fluid leak. The year before was a set of dead batteries and another fluid issue. The year before that. . . . You get the picture. It’s always something when you own a boat.

Upon entering his office, I braced myself for his diagnosis. There were several items of concern on his list, including a heavily rusted fuel vent pipe that would need to be cut out and replaced. He pulled out his iPhone and showed me the visible damage. It did not look pretty. How extensive the corrosion was, and whether it went all the way to the fuel tank, was uncertain. He said surgery would be required near the transom. 

We discussed some other items on his pad and I patiently nodded in agreement. The work needed to be done. I had to follow doctor’s orders. I decided to put off until next year a decision on replacing my aft deck, where a more pronounced sagging has occurred over the past few years. At least I know that repair is coming. It’s one less surprise to brace myself for. 

Most of the work has been completed on the boat. The bottom has been painted and the hull gleams in the dull sun with a fresh coat of marine wax. Despite the pain in the wallet I know to experience every spring, there is still a sense of excitement that the season has started and wetting a fishing line is just around the corner, even if Old Man Winter does not want to release his grip.

Fishing news so far has been rather scant, but a few intrepid anglers have decided it is time to break out their rods and reels to try their luck. 

“April 1 is the unofficial start of the fishing season,” explained Harvey Bennett, proprietor of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. “It was also the opening day of trout season. As kids, we would all be out catching largemouth bass [the season opens mid-June] and pickerel.” Bennett noted that East Hampton doesn’t have any trout in its ponds, but that the Town of Southampton does. The fish are stocked in a handful of ponds, most obviously Trout Pond in Noyac; however, only Southampton residents can fish in these waters. Folks who do not reside in the Town of Southampton need to hire a licensed guide to take advantage of the trout action. 

Bennett was also aware of some early striped bass action. “Some fish up to 20 inches have been taken in Three Mile Harbor, as well as in the cove behind the WLNG radio station in Sag Harbor,” he said. Small swimming plugs and rubber baits have been the lures of choice.

Ken Morse, who runs Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor, also had reports of a striped bass from local waters. “I heard one was caught near Otter Pond the other day,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll get some better weather soon and things will perk up more.”

And while bay scallop season concluded on Saturday, for those who remember what a flounder is, the season opened up on Sunday. Anglers are allowed two fish per person over 12 inches. The season closes at the end of May. As recently as 15 to 20 years ago, dozens of anglers could be found at the Shinnecock Canal catching their fair share of the once plentiful flatfish. Alas, those memories are likely to remain just that.

It’s that time of year when all of the birds start arriving and setting up homesteads here on eastern Long Island. More and more southern birds have been overwintering so it has become hard to say which ones are year-round residents and which ones are part-timers.

The most common early spring arrivals — the grackles, the redwings, and the robins — have been back for almost a month. In all three the males arrive three or four weeks before the females. The sexes are segregated until it is time to breed.

Last Thursday in the grassy strip between the sidewalk and Main Street in Sag Harbor near the library, there was a bunch of little dirt mounds, each one only a few inches apart from the closest neighbor. The earthworms had come up during the dampish evening. Before earthworms show up on lawns, they show up on the grassy shoulders of roads; that’s why the male robins seem to prefer hunting on the road shoulders while they wait for the females to return.

The redwing blackbird males started singing their screechy territorial songs early on, even before the females arrived. Each male serially courts more than one female, so the males stake out their territories early. Year-round residents have just begun singing their mating songs. Male cardinals were singing outside my window on Sunday but were quiet on Monday after the snowstorm.

In the last five or six years, some of the part-time residents have become full time. The turkey vulture is one such bird. Bob Adamo, a longtime birder of note, has been keeping track of the vultures that roost in trees and on buildings on both sides of Roanoke Avenue in Riverhead for several years. The winter flocks have been increasing and there are now as many as 55 turkey vultures in that area. This year they have been joined by three black vultures, much rarer to Long Island than the sibling species. It’s too early to tell whether this is another sign of global warming or just another case of a southern bird extending its range because it has become such a successful breeder and because its food supply, namely roadkill, has become more common as a direct result of the annual increase in motor vehicle traffic on our roads.

Ravens are also becoming a local item. A pair has been breeding on the Hampton Bays Water District water storage tower for at least four years running, but now other pairs are seen farther east. Indeed, Terry Sullivan photographed a pair on the ground at Havens Beach in Sag Harbor a week ago. Not too long ago the raven was considered to be threatened in New York State, but just like the osprey it has come back strong. When I was a boy growing up on the North Fork, we had neither ravens nor vultures.

And what about our national bird, the bald eagle? There are at least five nests on Long Island, one on Gardiner’s Island more than 10 years running. Just about everyone has seen one of them flying over the road here or there thus far this spring, but we have yet to find a nest on the South Fork proper, even though there have been more and more sightings each year.

The ospreys are back, notwithstanding the four back-to-back northeasters with gale-force winds and snowfalls in March. On Monday, there were two pairs on two of the Long Beach nests in Noyac and singletons on the newish nest on North Haven on the north end of the Route 114 bridge into Sag Harbor. Another was seen on a tree limb near the nest on the west side of Payne’s Cove in Noyac east of Noyac Road. Jean Held told me that Edi Kelman, who keeps track of the nest in Mashashimuet Park in Sag Harbor, had reported that it was occupied again by a pair of ospreys. Jean researched her photo collection and to her surprise discovered that she had photographed that very nest with baby ospreys in 2010, in other words, it has been used every year since.

Howard Reisman, who lives on North Sea Harbor and has been keeping track of Long Island’s largest alewife run since the very early 1970s, reported that they are back. However, the main entourage is still out there somewhere in Peconic Bay or the harbor. He’s seen several dead alewives at the little bridge on Noyac Road, where the stream runs to Big Fresh Pond, where their spawning area originates. He has also noted several ospreys overhead, the usual bunch of black-crowned night herons in the trees along the stream and at least one bald eagle making circles in the sky. Alewives and ospreys go together like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Karl Nilsen, who took a marvelous photograph of the brown booby that was hanging around Lake Montauk in the fall, just photographed the earliest local breeding bird of all, the great horned owl. An adult and an almost fully grown young one in what looked like an old red-tailed hawk nest in a tree in North Sea. By nesting as early as mid-January, these large owls get to pick the best nests constructed by a hawk or crow in the previous year, thus all they have to do is fix them up a bit. The risk must be worth it.

One last note: You may have read that the North Atlantic right whale population, which numbers only 300 to 400 individuals, has failed to produce a single calf this year. This was the whale of choice for those early South Fork settlers who waited and watched for one to come close enough to shore so they could launch a whaleboat through the surf and row out to harpoon it, a very dangerous way of making a living. The last one to be harpooned in this fashion was taken in the early 1900s by a crew off East Hampton’s shores. I was told by the late Norman Edwards, a scion of that great fishing family, that its skeleton is hanging from the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History.

The installation of 16 or more 600-foot-tall wind turbines directly in the south-to-north migration route of this highly endangered species is a risky idea. When there were only 27 California condors remaining, they were all caught alive, taken to zoos, and bred “in house,” so to speak. As of the end of 2016 there were more than 400 back in nature. How would one go about capturing and breeding right whales, which can be 70 feet long and weigh up to 150,000 pounds? 75 tons? Impossible, yes, impossible!

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

No doubt about it, various governmental marine fishery departments and scientists have had a challenging time collecting accurate data on the status of various stocks of fish that reside along the East Coast of the United States. For sure, it will likely never be an exact science. Fish swim and their patterns are not always predictable. 

While the fear of overfishing is a paramount concern for all involved, few fishermen, either recreational or commercial, can respond in unison that they are truly happy with many of the restrictions in quotas and allocations that they have had to endure for a number of years. And while politics, both good and bad, have played a part at times, it all adds up to a lot of frustration and outright anger that currently abounds in many quarters. 

One of the biggest sources of consternation for all surrounds black sea bass stocks, which — even according to scientists and fishery bureaus — are at a record height of population density. In fact, according to federal fishery scientists, the popular fish are at two and a half times times the rebuilding target for the fishery, yet New York State recreational anglers are faced with a possible decrease of almost 12 percent in the amount of sea bass they can retain this year. 

What is also particularly disturbing is that our neighbors to the south in New Jersey will witness an increase to the length of their fishing season and an increase in how many fish they can keep for dinner in 2018. It just does not make sense.

While the conundrum over sea bass allotments remains up in the air for the 2018 season, fishery management is poised to take a step in the right direction. As of March 12, Electronic Vessel Trip Reports (eVTRs) are now required for all Mid-Atlantic charter and party boat trips. At long last, reporting which and how many fish are caught on a charter or party boat can be accomplished utilizing the latest technology. 

It took a while, but technology has come to the well-worn docks of Montauk and other Long Island ports, and hopefully to the benefit of scientists who tally the catches.

Those operators who possess a federal charter or party boat permit for species managed by NOAA Fisheries and the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and are on a trip carrying passengers for hire, now need to submit an eVTR by electronic means through a NOAA-approved software application. The electronic reports need to be submitted within 48 hours of completing a fishing trip. 

Fish that will be bound by the rule include Atlantic mackerel, squid, butterfish, summer flounder, porgy, black sea bass, bluefish, and tilefish. The new reporting system was to have taken effect this past fall, but NOAA Fisheries delayed the implementation to provide vessel owners and operators time to obtain the software application and necessary training to comply with the new regulation. 

Federally permitted charter and party boats have always been required to fill out paper VTR logs, but that information was never really utilized by NOAA Fisheries for annual harvest details. Instead, the agency has relied almost exclusively on the Marine Recreational Fishing Statistical Survey and the Marine Recreational Information Program to compile annual catch data in the recreational fishing community.

NOAA Fisheries said in a statement that it is “working to reduce the reporting burden on fishermen while improving data collection procedures in order to obtain data that is more timely, accurate, and useful. The time delays and inaccuracies associated with current data collection in the charter and party fishing fleets reduce our ability to use the data in making management decisions. This action is intended to improve this data collection and improve the utility of the data.” The eVTRs are to be submitted through handheld electronic devices such as iPhones or tablets, or through a web portal on a personal computer.

“It’s definitely a positive move,” said Capt. Michael Potts of the Montauk charter boat Blue Fin IV. “No more saving and mailing in our reports. I have not sailed a trip yet, so of course we don’t know if there are going to be any glitches. But it’s a step in the right direction.”

Time will tell how much eVTR’s will be of a true aid to federal marine scientists and managers, but true accuracy in the status of various fish populations can hopefully make those final decisions easier.

On the current fishing scene, cold and windy weather continues to inhibit many from taking an active role in dunking some bait, whether it be from boat or shoreline. On a quick ride past the Shinnecock Canal on Sunday morning, I did not witness a single person wetting a line for flounder. The once incredibly popular spring fishery is sadly most likely gone forever, as flounder stocks remain at all-time lows. 

Over at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, the owner, Harvey Bennett, had some more positive news on the fishing front. “I was just down at Napeague Harbor and saw a bald eagle flying with a striped bass in its talons,” he said on Monday morning. “It was a beautiful sight to see. So, some stripers are around.” 

Bennett was especially enthused about the freshwater fishing action of late. “The fishing has been hot,” he said. “Fresh Pond and Fort Pond in Montauk have largemouth bass and pickerel in good supply. Tins, swimming lures, and worms are all working. I also saw two big walleyes taken in Fort Pond on worms.” He added that if you want to tangle with some carp, fish up to 20 pounds were landed over the past week.

Bennett also noted that the alewives have arrived in various backwater streams and dreens. A member of the herring family, alewives are not great to eat but serve as important forage for many larger predator fish.

As a reminder, striped bass season opens on Sunday. Anglers are once again allowed to retain one fish over 28 inches per day. And for the first time in a number of years, fishermen can try their luck in April for blackfish. The daily limit is two fish over 16 inches per person. The season ends on April 30. 

While a spring season for blackfish is welcome news, a fishery in the month of May would have provided anglers with a greater chance of actually keeping a few. Our East End waters are usually too cold in April to provide any consistent action for the feisty fighters.

As our planet continues to heat up and sea level rises commensurately due to melting glacial water, we think about ways to survive, comfortably if possible, and one of these ways is to switch from gasoline and coal to forms of energy production that don’t require the burning of carbon-derived materials. We are making progress, but we have a long, long way to go.

Many forms of life are able to adjust their body temperatures to the ambient temperature. Hummingbirds, for one, don’t need to maintain a constant consistent high temperature of over 100 degrees. Come the setting of the sun and a concomitant decrease in activity and a hummingbird’s internal temperature drops with the temperature around it. There may be a yoga-like exercise that would enable us humans, after a long period of training, to reduce our temperature as the hummingbird can, but we don’t want to catch our death of cold while we work to achieve such ability.

Let’s face it. We are about as homeothermic as any organism can be: We don’t like it either too hot or too cold. Ever since a caveman shed all of his hair and rubbed two sticks together to make the first fire thousands of years ago, we have been averse to being cold. Burning fossil fuels keeps us warm.

It is only in the last centnury and a half, particularly so after the invention of the electric lightbulb and reciprocating engine, that the modern human has begun to look at ways not dependent upon the oxidation of carbon to produce heat, light, radio waves, transportation, and a host of other modern processes by which we measure progress.

The first carbonless method applied worldwide more than a century ago to produce electricity was the earthen dam. Hydroelectric dams are still being built, not so much here in America, but in Asia and Africa, to name two continents where dams are still in fashion. However, when you dam a river for the purposes of producing power, you unleash a bunch of problems: reduced flow downstream; stopping fish migration, as with salmon in the Pacific Northwest; dam failures and catastrophic release of floodwater, and so on. If it weren’t for a system of dams installed in rivers around New York City providing water for washing, drinking, and watering, its residents would be drinking contaminated local water and the city would become much less populous than it is today.

But we are running out of time, out of clean natural resources. We will soon be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. We don’t have a lot of leisure time to act and it will be curtains, and if not curtains, miserable lives at best. So we are acting, not as quickly as we should, but at least we are acting to reverse the tide of pending misery. We have several choices. Some of those not based on carbon are proven to be effective. Others, such as smashing atoms and making hydrogen fuel cells, are problematic, either because they are hazardous or too complicated to mass manufacture and mass distribute.

The ones that work the best and are the most promising have been around for a long time, but have only recently been tapped as we realize that the old carbon-based forms can only lead to ultimate ruin. The new ones are as old as the sun, as old as the wind, as old as the core below us. They are solar, wind, and geothermal power.

We’ve known for more than a century or two that the water underneath our feet, in other words groundwater, is quite a bit warmer than the surface waters that fill our lakes and ponds and run in our rivers and streams. But it is only within this millennium that we are beginning to develop this energy source. To wit, the forward-looking Bridgehampton School will be getting much of its heat from groundwater coursing through heat pumps. There are several residences and other buildings on Long Island taking advantage of the heat below, which rarely falls below 50 degrees.

Harnessing wind to produce electrical energy has only been around for half a century or so, but it is now accounting for more than 4 percent of the electricity produced globally. Wind turbines have been around for hundreds of years, not for producing electricity but for milling grain. There is an operational mill in Water Mill. Solar production of electricity around the world approaches 2 percent, but is increasing at a faster pace than wind-power electricity. It is easier to equip individual homes with solar panels than with wind turbines.

On the other hand, wind turbines kill birds, bats, and butterflies, to name a major drawback of their use, while solar panels on rooftops kill very few organisms, almost none. Putting wind turbines out in the ocean may change the ecology of fish, marine mammals, and seabirds. Solar panels on roofs have yet to produce a noticeable impact on birds or other organisms. Geothermal power may be the least harmful to nature of all three. We will have to watch as it becomes more popular.

We have three operational wind turbines in East Hampton along or near Long Lane, not far from East Hampton High School. We also have quite a few homes with solar panels in East Hampton and Southampton Towns. One owner of a house with solar panels is Tom Talmage, the East Hampton Town engineer, who lives across from the high school. For 13 or so years his panels have been producing electricity. When they are in operation, when it is sunny and in the warmer months of the year, they actually contribute more electrical power to the PSEG grid than they take in. As far as energy costs go, Tom says he almost breaks even.

What is apparent, however, when one uses that wonderful computer application Google Maps, is that there is a paucity of buildings on the South Fork equipped with solar panels. Some of these buildings are expansive. The storetops in the Bridgehampton Commons mall total about 200,000 square feet. If provided with modern solar panels, the Commons could not only provide enough electricity to power all of its operations, but could power another 1,000 or so houses that are now on the PSEG grid. A few South Fork commercial and public buildings do have solar panels. One private company building, the Buzz Chew Chevrolet dealership on County Road 39 in Southampton has many solar panels that can be easily observed on Google Maps. On the other hand, on the same Google Map, one sees not a single one on the roofs of the other three dealerships in close proximity. Granted, some of those images may be a few years old. 

Among the municipal and institutional buildings on the South Fork with solar panels, you can spot Southampton Village’s police station and public works building, Southampton High School, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike), the East Hampton Village Emergency Services Building, the Amagansett Firehouse (where there is also a wind turbine), and Springs School. The roofs on these buildings represent only a very small percentage of the commercial and public building roof space available for solarization. Almost none of the very large local estate homes in the area have solar panels. If you have the money to pay $200 or $400 or more a month for PSEG electricity from the grid, why bother? 

But we should bother, shouldn’t we? Interestingly, there are no laws in the local zoning codes requiring solar or wind power installations. It seems that considerations concerning electrical power are completely up to the New York Power Authority, the Long Island Power Authority, and PSEG.

Robert Carbone, a spokesman for one of Long Island’s many solar panel companies, SuNation, said that the firm has been doing a brisk solar business, not withstanding the threat of Trump tariffs on solar panels imported from China. SuNation installed solar panels on three of the South Fork buildings mentioned above.

To go back to the Tom Talmage solar roof across from the high school, Tom said the company that installed the panels came back during the first year or two to check how they were operating. Among other devices, Tom has an expensive air-conditioning system because of an asthmatic condition. He says that it has been working well all these years on the electricity provided by his solarized roof.

It was pleasant last Thursday afternoon as I drove from Noyac to Southampton. I had just left Edge of Woods Road for David White’s Lane when I came upon about 50 gulls landing in a just-plowed strip on the west side of the road. 

A few hundred yards down the road, I came upon a farmer on his tractor. Three or four of the gulls were looming over the soil, closely following the plow. Through the windshield they looked like mature herring gulls, but a closer look revealed yellow-green legs, not the characteristically pink legs, and their yellow bills had black rings, not red blotches. They were obviously looking for grubs and other insects turned up by the plow. Ring-billed gulls often overwinter here before taking off in mid-April to go to their breeding grounds along the shores of Lake Ontario and other northern lakes throughout North America. Yes, the annual turning over the earth, so widespread a practice on the East End of Long Island, was in progress and a wonderful sight to behold.

I was immediately reminded of that wonderful time in my youth on the North Fork when on a sunny day in April just about every operable tractor was out plowing. I knew the names of the tractors — John Deere, Farmall, Massy-Harris, Ford, Allis Chalmers, Case, Ferguson — better than I knew the names of the automobiles. It was the moment we all waited for. Just about every inhabitant in Southold and Riverhead Towns had a garden. We were still fighting the Germans and the Japanese. It was the break we needed after a tough winter of ice and snow.

As soon as the locals saw the tractors out of the barns, an annual signal, they knew it was time to get working on their gardens. In the 1940s your home garden, sometimes called a victory garden, was normally much less than an acre, and divided up into many smaller plots, each plot dedicated to a particular vegetable. Almost everybody also had patches of asparagus and rhubarb. The former appeared early as erect dull-green spears sticking up from the ground. Sometimes we homeowners would hire a man and his tractor to plow our plot, other times we would plow it ourselves with a hand-pushed cultivator.

Growing food, or crop farming, dates back to the rise of civilization in eastern Asia and northern Africa thousands of years ago. By the middle of the 20th century it had not changed all that much. One scarred a piece of flattish earth, dropped seeds in the scars, and covered them up, maybe added some water if it was a dry period, and perhaps a little fertilizer. The hoe was the principal tool. The standard gardening posture was bending over, legs semistraight. 

We began to prepare for the annual event not long after Christmas. First we imagined what it would be like, then we got out the seed catalogs, in particular the Burpee catalog, and began to think about what we were going to plant. It seems that each year we added a new item or two as the seeds became available. In 1945 it was popcorn, before that it was honeydew melons.

But we never forgot the old standards: peas, lettuce, green beans, corn, squash, cucumbers, beets, carrots, melons, pumpkins, turnips, cabbage, and cauliflower. One made space for each and planted the different seeds successively as the right time in April and May and June came along. Peas, lettuce, beets, and carrots were generally the first to be seeded, cabbage and cauliflower the last. Some of the different seeds were ordered from the catalogs in March, other purchased at the local hardware store just before planting.

Of course our spirits were high and the youngest of us would go out each morning before school to see if any of the seeds had germinated. It was like Christmas morning when one woke early and tiptoed down to the presents under the tree. Most times it took at least two weeks for the seeds to sprout up above the earth’s surface. When the first plants shot up it was a most happy time. We youngsters compared notes, bragging if our seeds sprouted first.

As each species of vegetable came up we would be there to mark its appearance. The family plot began to look like a garden after all, with neat row after neat row filling up the space from one end to the other. It was very rare that particular seeds didn’t sprout.

As pleased as we were with the flourishing assortment, when it came to weeding, sometimes by hand, sometimes with a hoe, some of our joy subsided. Weeding, or cultivating, was as important as planting or harvesting. Some of the weeds, for example, lamb’s quarters, were fed to the chickens and pigs. Very little went to waste.

We all raised livestock, as well. Most everyone had chickens, some had a cow or two, pigs, goats, turkeys, and ducks. Before school and after school and on the weekends there was always something to tend to. Next door, my grandfather ran the largest chicken farm on eastern Long Island, but, nevertheless, we had our own chickens — Barred Rocks — as well as Muscovy ducks.

Part of the fun of raising livestock was trying to catch them when they got loose from their pens. As soon as the ducks could fly they would start practicing. I would be dispatched to find them once they landed, usually less than a few hundred yards away.

The pigs got loose once and my brother and father made a “deadfall,” covered it with reeds and baited the middle of it. It worked, but it wasn’t easy getting half-grown pigs out of the deep hole.

Oh, there was another side to all of this work. We sold some of the food by the side of the road: strawberries in late May, corn in July and August, melons and pumpkins come September. The daughters were the chief salespeople, a card table was the counter. 

Moms had the most difficult and time-consuming jobs of all. We harvested more than we could eat and the surplus had to be preserved for fall and winter dining. Every home had a canning closet, a system of shelves on which Mason jars were kept, either clean and empty or filled with canned food. Just about every home had a pressure cooker. The Mason jars would be filled and placed in the pressure cooker, which sat on a stove burner until the food in the jars was “preserved,” that is, cooked and sterilized.

Cucumbers were pickled and stored in jars.

We also played games, but we didn’t have TVs and being outside was preferable to being indoors. When we had a little time to kill, we would pick berries and fruit. Some of us raised raspberries, currants, gooseberries, and the like, but better than those, the blueberries, huckleberries, black cherries, and beach plums were sweet, bountiful, and you could eat as many as you saved in containers. In certain falls, the Penny family would drive over to the South Fork and pick cranberries, the last items to be harvested each year.

One of my very best memories, which came late in the season, was sitting on top of our pigpen building, eating watermelons one after the other with the Presbyterian minister’s son, then throwing the rinds to the pigs. We were pretty tired out after all the harvesting and preserving was done for the year, generally by Halloween. When the fruit and vegetables were gone, and after we rested up a bit, we’d be out in the creek or bay digging clams, soft and hard, later, sometimes, duck hunting. It sure beat Little League baseball and school.

Funny, I can’t remember ever seeing a “soccer mom” in town.

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