The edge of the world’s oceans is the shore, and it is continually modified by storm times. It comes and goes, builds and jettisons. In areas where rocky land masses dip directly into the sea, the shore may be less than two feet wide on average. Where more sand is delivered than taken away, the shore, then the beach, can be hundreds of feet wide. There is no surface geologic formation in the world longer than the shore.

    If you were to measure the shorelines of the five continents and the one supercontinent, Eurasia, and add those distances up, you would get a figure of about 115,500 miles, that is about two and a third times larger than the circumference of the earth taken at the equator. To travel the world’s entire marine shoreline by boat, riding night and day at say at an average speed of 10 miles per hour, it would take approximately 11,550 hours, or 481 days. No one has ever done so, so we don’t have a Guinness Book of Records figure for such an ambitious excursion.

    Is the world’s shoreline length increasing or shrinking? That is the one of the major questions posed by global warming. As sea level increases, in almost every situation, the shoreline recedes. When an island or a salt marsh drowns, as is happening in Jamaica and Chesapeake Bays, the shoreline moves landward. In some northern areas of North America and Eurasia, such as the coast of Alaska, the shore is building seaward. The land is rising. As the glaciers melt away, the land becomes lighter and thus is buoyed up. When the glaciers have melted away completely, the land under them will reach it highest elevation, approximate to that prior to the last ice age, 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, as the glaciers melted back toward the Arctic Circle.

    Of course, all that melted ice water is freshening up the seas, but that’s a topic for another day. Eurasia, including the British Isles and Japan, has the longest coastline, more than 40,000 miles long. North America, including Greenland and Central America, comes next with about 32,250 miles, then Africa with 16,900 miles of shore. The seventh continent, Antarctica, has the least, only 6,000 miles of it.

    Millions of years ago, the world’s collective coastline was considerably shorter, as South and North America were congealed with Europe and Africa. The Atlantic Ocean was only a dimple. The two continental systems are moving away from each other at a rate of a few millimeters a year. At the present rate of separation, the two plate systems will have moved apart by a few meters in a million years, by a more than two kilometers in 100 million years, and so on and so on. That’s how the three species of freshwater lungfishes in the world ended up in Africa, South America, and Australia: They drifted apart from their progenitor species.

    You can find marine fossils loosed from the sides of Kentucky rockslides. How did they get there? Well, the seas reached all the way to the Midwest before orogenesis created the Appalachian Mountains, which raised the level of the land well above sea level and the seas receded hundreds of miles to the east. In the American West marine fossils can be found on the west side of the Sierras and in Arizona. Where did all this water come from anyway? The prevailing theory is that the earth was dry or almost dry until bombarded by comets, which are mostly made of ice. How many comets created the world’s oceans and how large were they on average? Those are questions still to be answered by astrophysicists, astronomers, and geologists. And come the next ice age — there have been several — coastlines will shrink, shores will widen, and we might be right back where we started 15 millennia ago.

    Some people prefer the mountains. Some prefer slow moving rivers and rapid running streams. Born on Long Island’s North Fork in Mattituck, which is low in elevation and has no rivers or streams, I was raised with a limited hydrologic view, but at an early age I did learn about the seas and many of their mysteries. I lived a few hundred yards from two of what are now known as national estuaries — the Long Island Sound and the Peconics — two of the 20-plus in coastal America. Physiologists and medical doctors tell us that our vital fluids are not so different from seawater. Saline is still administered in lieu of blood in some emergencies.

    My vital fluids must be very similar, as the thought of living somewhere inland away from the edge of the sea sends me into a tizzy. The beat and lapping of the waves is not so different in meter from the beat of the sea person’s heart. A sea without tides and waves is not a sea according to my personal lexicon.

    While exobiologists search for extraterrestrial life in meteorites, which could provide one explanation for the origin of life on Earth, most of the scientists trying to explain life’s origin, the first fossil evidence of which now dates back to more than eight billion years, believe that life originated in the soup of salts and organic molecules found at the seas’ edge, not unlike, perhaps, the soup froth that we see on occasion in the wake of the receding waves. We do know that many, many invertebrates and fishes evolved in seawater, but we still have a long way to go before we know for certain just how life originated here.

   The plan was to sail the sloop Leilani to the porgy grounds on the east side of Gardiner’s Island from Montauk Harbor on Sunday, preparing clam baits along the way. We’d done it before: stayed the night at an anchorage in the cove on the north side of the island, and feasted on grilled porgy washed down with a glass or two of wine, making the return trip the next morning.

    With a strong southwest wind, Sunday seemed a perfect day for the trip. It was more west than south and this demanded a course north of Eastern Plains Point, our destination, but hey, what’s the rush? The thing about sailing is the silence, long stretches of time with no sound but the wind, the ping of a line playing on the mast, the groan of a wooden cabinet below deck, and Gardiner’s Bay rushing along the hull. 

    Leilani trolled a tin in hopes of a bass. The mate was on the bow with her binoculars. The wind off the sea, partially blocked by Hither Hills, grew as it blew unhindered across flat Napeague into the bay. And it backed, coming more southwest. Leilani would have no lee off Tobaccolot as hoped.

    The planned starboard tack disappeared with the wind change and Leilani’s “iron wind” was brought to life. She motor-sailed close-hauled the final mile to the point at the south end of Tobaccolot Bay. Sails were doused and Leilani turned broadside, allowing the porgy fishermen to lower their lines and drift as though on a raft floating downstream in the Mississippi.

    But, it was after three in the afternoon and the wind had increased to near 20 knots. There would be time for only one drift, with the peace broken by the need to shorten sail for a comfortable return trip. Leilani had drifted north off Eastern Plains Point with no bites but that view of the island’s rolling hills, big oaks, and grassland where time stopped centuries ago.

    Time to go. The mate was reeling up her line when it struck. A big, fat, silver and pink porgy was lifted onto the deck. It was declared a “poor thing” by the mate, who begged its forgiveness and put it in the bucket for dinner. With mainsail and jib reefed, a 19-knot wind and a tide going her way, Leilani bounded home with a following sea and a lone porgy that was the icing on the cake.

    It would be nice if fishing had not become a competitive sport, but it seems everything we do has morphed into a competition, something to bet on, profit from, get over on, as though Nature herself had turned pro. Seems like the urge to provide has gotten twisted in the age of farmed fish and genetically engineered staples.

    There are fishermen, and fishing guides, who insist on experiencing the world, and presenting the world, that accompanies the actual angling. Saltwater Sportsman magazine recently named Paul Dixon of East Hampton one of the top 50 charter fishermen in the nation and the only one from Long Island. There are sure to be a few objections to this last point. Dixon runs To the Point charters for fly-fishing and light spin-tackle anglers.

    Captains were chosen by virtue of their “longevity,” the diversity of the fish they target, their commitment to conservation, and their “showmanship.” By showmanship, the mag apparently means making the experience memorable, which theoretically would put Ahab and his followers in the running. Fishing with Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, is memorable, especially in the fall when he runs his “cast-and-blast” charters out into Gardiner’s Bay, geared up with a fishing rod for striped bass and a shotgun for the sea ducks.

    Capt. Ken (Ahab) Rafferty said this week that “fishing is intense.” The light-tackle and fly-fishing guide reported “giant bluefish all over Montauk on the south side in close. Stripers are being landed at outer Shagwong, but you have to work hard to find them. I’ve received reports of false albacore between Rhode Island and Montauk, and albies in Montauk waters, too.”

    The fall fishing tournament season is nigh. The Montauk SurfMasters tourney begins on Sept. 14. Applications to join in the action will be accepted until 7 p.m. on Sept. 13, no later. The entry fee in the adult wader and wetsuit divisions is $260, $160 for the women’s division. There are no entry fees in the kids and youth divisions. The leader board will be displayed on the tournament Web site, montauksurfmasters. com.

    The State Department of Parks and Recreation will kick off its annual, two-day Montauk Classic surfcasting tournament on Sept. 20. Application forms can be obtained by calling 321-3510. There is a $15 entry fee.

    The striped bass seem to have made their August creep to points north and east, but they will be back on their fall run in time for the tourneys. Meanwhile, the fluke fishing has been spectacular, the best in years off Montauk and in Gardiner’s Bay. The fall sea bass season promises to be exceptional — yum! — with a great showing in May and June and even through the summer when the bite generally slows.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, has announced its intention of reducing the number of bluefin tuna “bycatch discards,” that is, bluefin caught by longline gear in the swordfish fishery and longlines set for other tuna species. Comments from the public are being sought. More information can be had by calling Connie Barclay at 301-427-8003. The draft plan to reduce bluefin bycatch can be found online at nmfs.noaa. gov.

    Speaking of tuna, Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina in Montauk reports very few yellowfin and albacore in the Fish Tails section of Block Canyon, but a consistent bigeye bite. The Three G’s boat returned to the marina on Monday with a 244 bigeye, a small swordfish, one yellowtail, and an albacore tuna.

    The first to identify the mystery fish, whose photo appeared in last week’s Star, was Richard Peltonen of Montauk. He said it was a ladyfish, a species also known as a skipjack, a jack-rash, or a tenpounder. They are usually found in tropical and sub-tropical waters. A runner-up caller was Gus Washburn of East Hampton, age 10, who yelled “Yippee” into the phone when he was told he was right.

    Last week’s reporting on the results of the Montauk Grand Slam held from Uihlein’s Marina left out the name of the winning captain and angler in the recreational division. The Coffee Break was captained by William Callas, who was out with his longtime fishing buddy Rich Lanzillotta.

   It wasn’t that long ago in the history of the United States that small communities made the world go round. Urbanization took a back seat to farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering fruit and vegetables from the wild. You would be hard-pressed today trying to survive in a big city if you had to grow, catch, and gather your own food. Yes, New York City and all the other big ones have a few things to glean from the parks, wires, streets, sewers, and transportation tunnels, but in a place where there are many more people than there are squirrels, rats, and pigeons to feed them, things would turn mighty desperate and quickly if markets, restaurants, and sidewalk vendors all shut down.

    In the past, ethnic groups migrated as much to find food as to find freedom. The sizes of rural communities were determined as much by the available resources — food, water, shelter materials — as they were by choice of neighbors and closeness to relatives. Today, via programs like the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund, we put away a lot of passive parklands and nature sanctuaries for safekeeping. It’s not just a matter of the open spaces and concomitant view-sheds that we are salting away; it’s the resources.

    When the original town fathers, say, the trustees, split up the land into chunks (after purchasing it from the local indigenous people for a pittance), the idea was to allot enough land to each would-be freeholder to provide enough lumber, firewood, arable soil, well water reserves, and the like to raise a family. It wasn’t until the 1900s that large lots began to be split up into tiny lots as small as the less than quarter-acre one that I and my wife, Julie, share in Noyac.

    You can hardly raise a cow or pigs on a quarter acre, but you can raise chickens should the local ordinances allow it. You can even have a small garden, but one would find it hard to grow enough food on such a small plot to last for more than a month or so.

    The open space that belongs to everyone in the community also serves as a “commons” to ensure survival in a rural setting. The forefathers were wise in making sure that the bay and creek bottoms and the waters above them could be used by everyone for the harvesting of clams, oysters, mussels, crabs, fish, and other seafood. The old rule about only taking oysters during the “R” months was good for all in the community, because oysters spawned in the months without an R in their names, which ensured reproduction for future years. One by one little rules were established so that the resource would last indefinitely.

    Side by side each town, village, and hamlet shared the resources among themselves. If someone got greedy and took more then their share there was hell to pay. Domestic pigs were allowed to roam in the woods to feed on plants and acorns, chickens “free-ranged” hundreds of years before the term became part of our everyday vocabulary. Churches preached sharing and leading a good life. There were very few crimes, very few criminals, almost no murders. People got together to build barns, work the land, catch fish, and the like. One might say that all the farmers markets that have sprung up locally and around the country lately are vestiges of those early times.

    Whaling and fishing from shore was one of those cementing community ventures. Just as it takes a lot of volunteer firefighters to put out a house fire, it took a lot of hands to harpoon a whale from near shore or bring in a large net. Haul-seining was the final act of such cooperation and sharing of effort. Practically every man in the community helped pull the quarter-mile-long nets in before there were motor-driven winches, but even after their introduction, 20 men or more would participate in a haul. Young boys would work alongside their fathers and in that way would be initiated into the fishermen’s lot. When fishery science took over and the beaches were filled with regulators, haulseining died an agonizing death and baymen were forced to go their separate ways.

   Fortunately, the land is there in case calamity strikes and we need to go back to it. In the meantime, why not practice for an Armageddon that may never come. “Be prepared.” Every Boy Scout knows that one. Learn to fish, learn to clam, maybe even hunt. Pick wild berries. The blueberries are just about gone, but beach plums are ripening as are the wild cherries. I know one local fellow who makes bread out of white oak acorns each year. Many locals make delicious wine from wild elderberries and fox grapes. Cranberries are developing nicely. Pick and glean, glean and pick, but always obey that old canon: “Don’t take more than you and your family and/or neighbors can use.” Extras can go to the food pantry or the birds.

    You would surely be surprised to find out just how many things out there in those wide open spaces are edible, how nutritious they can be, and how good they can taste. Those that are not edible can often be used as palliatives or healers. Some can serve both needs. I’ll never forget the lady from Montauk who used to work in the East Hampton Town assessor’s office. She got bit by a brown recluse spider and turned to an age-old remedy: She took two green potatoes, mashed them up finely into a puree, then applied that puree directly to the spider bite as a poultice. She left it on overnight and by morning the bite had faded away. I gave the recipe to my sister in Cutchogue after she got bittens by a brown recluse. A poultice worked for her as well. A poultice made from the tuber of Apios americana, or groundnut, which gave Sagaponack its Algonkian name, would probably work, too.

    And, oh yes, be especially careful when gathering mushrooms. Many are edible, but several, such as the most toxic of the amanitas, will knock you off in less than an hour after you eat them.

   The great migration south is about to begin. It will include millions of birds, millions of fish, many different bats, and quite a lot of butterflies and dragonflies. Although at the boreal latitudes, many mammals, including two species of caribou, use their legs to march long distances, in the temperate zone where we are, migration is a matter of wings and fins. Shorebirds, terns and ospreys, to name a few, have already started down. Some of them go thousands of miles, deep into South America, a few like the Arctic tern, all the way to Patagonia.

    There is a lot of exposure accompanying migration. Just as driving 1,000 miles on roads and highways in uncharted territory increases the chances of an accident severalfold over compared to driving back and forth around one’s neighborhood, the vulnerability for migrating animals and insects traveling long distances is increased exponentially over that for all-year residents such as house sparrows and blue jays that are mostly stay-at-homes.

    One way to minimize the chance of predator encounters by birds is to migrate at night rather than during the day. While owls are adept nighttime predators — they are usually looking for mice, rats, and small mammals to feed on — bird hawks don’t fly at night. The chief worries for the night migrants are meteorological in nature; however, in 20th century a new obstacle to night migration was created, this one anthropomorphic in origin. Encounters with skyscrapers in large cities across the globe account for thousands of bird deaths during times of migration. Toronto has the distinction of causing the most losses, but New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, D.C., and so on are not far behind.

    Think about it, ever since the end of the last ice age, for at least 10,000 years or more, birds have been migrating north and south annually, mostly at night. One hundred centuries of clear unobstructed sailing back and forth over the same routes and then one year, boom, tall buildings appear out of nowhere and birds start falling like flies. In addition to the hundreds of looming edifices now in the path of any one of the main north-south migratory routes, there are thousands of windmills and cellphone towers making migration through unlighted skies a real problem. It takes many, many generations to change a pattern of instinctive behavior that is thousands of years old!

    So, why not migrate during the day? If you are a small bird or insect, you better be careful, for hawks and other expert avian predators will be waiting for you. Better have some kind of protection or it’s curtains for a lot of you. At least for one species, the monarch butterfly, protection comes from having an unsavory taste. Both males and females are identically bright orange and readily detectable from above or below as they move south toward the overwintering grounds in Mexico’s mountains. Some may be blown off course by stiff winds, but very few are taken by predators. They taste simply awful.

    Monarch butterfly eggs are laid on milkweeds, which contain a sap that is not only acrid tasting but poisonous as well. Almost no herbivorous mammals, such as cottontail rabbits and deer, have use for milkweeds. The larvae of monarch butterflies and milkweed beetles, however, prefer them. As they eat and grow larger, they store those unpalatable chemicals in their body tissue and when they pupate and emerge from their pupae as flying adults, their body tissues still contain them. That is why the milkweed beetle is also spectacularly marked bright red and black. It’s called warning coloration: “I am a monarch butterfly, I am a milkweed beetle, you can see me clearly, come and take a bite.” Predators have learned not to.

    In fact, red is a standard warning color for many diverse creatures. The West Coast newt, Taricha torosa, is a good example. Eat a little bit of this salamander and you’re liable to become deader than a doornail. It’s like eating a death angel mushroom. The velvet ant, in actuality a wingless wasp, has a potent sting. Fortunately, it is bright red and black, and so is usually uncontested. The female black widow spider is another good example. The western species have a red hourglass on the underside of the abdomen, the eastern ones, including the ones on Long Island, have a red rear end or red spot just above it. “Stay away, I’m warning you,” the red mark says for the spider. (The male is much smaller, not poisonous, and nondescript in coloration.).

    Bats are adept at catching flying insects in the dark, so it makes sense that they would migrate at night, nibbling along the way as they fly to their winter quarters in caves hundreds of miles away. One local exception is the red bat, which every year crosses Long Island on its way north in the spring and south in the fall, flying during the day. Its redness is a kind of mimicry. It is not poisonous or bad-tasting itself, but why take a chance? The viceroy butterfly, which occurs farther to the west, is almost identical in coloration to the monarch. It mimics the monarch and is mostly safe from predation. However, viceroys, which stray to areas where monarchs never exist, are another matter. They are easy game. Fortunately for viceroys, monarchs have a very widespread distribution in North America. The lionfish, which strays into our marine waters during the warmer months, is quite red and quite poisonous. In human society, red also serves as a warning color. Which came first: the red warning signs of humans or those of insects, salamanders, fish, and bats?

    The human species is one of the few in which the female is generally more attractive than the male. Female clothing and accouterments such as lipstick and hairdos, bikinis and high heels, jewelry and perfume heighten their attractiveness.

    The opposite is true in songbirds, however. The males are mostly knockouts and the females drab. Moreover, the males sing better than the females, which are mostly silent except for chips and peeps. It’s a simple case of differential survival. It’s easier for a bird predator to spot and catch a prettily clad male than a dull-colored female. In nature just as in human cultures, you can pay a price for too much vanity.

   While the brown recluse spider is an exception, most poisonous animals are vividly colored or advertise their toxic state in other ways. Take the poisonous coral snake of the Southeast. Its red and black banding is quite obvious. The scarlet king snake has the same coloration and is harmless. But unless you’re an expert ophidiologist, I’d avoid both. The gila monster’s yellow and black beading over its body is scary. Bumblebees are bright yellow and black. They don’t want to sting you. They’ll die if they lodge a stinger in you, but they will if cornered.

    On the other hand, some poisonous animals do not possess warning colors; they have other means of saying “beware, beware!” The rattlesnake rattles, the cobra rears up, flattens its collar, and hisses. Long Island’s own eastern hognose snake doesn’t have a rattle, but it hisses and shakes its tail in the sand mimicking the two poisonous snakes. If that doesn’t work, it rolls over and plays dead, an altogether different kind of defense mechanism, which is used by opossums and several other species.

    The blowfish, or northern puffer, blows up when cornered, becoming almost unswallowable to most would-be predators. The squids and octopi secrete a blinding ink.

    There are all sorts of ways of protecting oneself without having to go to war. When I was a young boy, my mother advised me to act stuporously when traveling on subways in New York. Nobody will hit on you if they think you are weird. I wonder if that stills works today?

    There’s more to fishing than the catch, and whether they say it or not, fishermen pursue more than fish when they take to the sea to face both its healing and destructive powers.

    We were reminded of this last week when friends gathered to remember Dashiel Marder, 30, of Springs, who disappeared while spearfishing off a remote island in Indonesia in April. And we were sadly reminded again on Saturday when Donald Alversa, 24, a deckhand aboard the Montauk dragger Jason and Danielle, died of injuries sustained while fishing off the coast of North Carolina. And yet again when seven veterans took to the sea on Sunday as part of the Healing Waters program designed to set them free from the prison of traumatic memories.

    Allan Portnoy served in Vietnam with the 720th Military Police Battalion tasked as infantry that convoyed munitions to the Cambodian border among other things. Perfecto Sanchez, a 2005 graduate of West Point, served two tours in Iraq and participated in the battle for Ramadi.

    Sanchez said he met the former Army captain Andrew Roberts, a 1997 graduate of West Point, at the Orvis tackle shop on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Roberts had also served two tours in Iraq.

    “We decided to go fly-fishing together,” Roberts said as he, now a leader in the Healing Waters project, and the other veterans on the fishing trip prepared to return to the city. The five men and two women had just stepped from two boats based at the Star Island Yacht Club operated by guides David Blinken of David Blinken Charters and Robin Calitri of Csicagain Charters. Blinken serves on the board of Healing Waters.

    Accommodations for the group the night before the trip were donated by the Montauk Beach House.

    Roberts said when he returned after his last tour, “I would be in a bar and people would be completely carefree. There was no conversation about what was going on — a total apathy.” He said he took a pay cut to join Healing Waters, a group that had grown out of the Veteran Anglers of New York, founded by Richard and Tamara Franklin, a psychologist who specializes in traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress syndrome.

    “There are a lot of shared experiences and so a shared respect,” Roberts said referring to the bonds among vets from the Vietnam War and their younger compatriots. “There’s amazing similarities.” The big difference is what it was like when they came home.

    “We were welcomed home,” Sanchez said. The Vietnam vets made an effort to give his peers what was missing 40 years ago, he said.

    Bob Moran went fishing. He was a Marine based in DaNang, finishing up with the rank of Sergeant. “I never lost any of my men,” he said.

    Manuel Vasquez, known as Manny, was in the Special Forces based in Na Trang, “the Fifth Special Forces Group, Green Berets, Airborne from ’67 and the fall of ’68 to the beginning of ’69 through the Tet Offensive. I got a combat infantry badge,” and he said, holding up several plastic bags-full of filets, sea bass from the day’s outing.

    “I know the resentment. I didn’t know I was even eligible for benefits. I went 40 years. Now kids coming out are on the milk wagon. We were in the wilderness,” Vasquez said.

    Audonelle Loreto had a 21-year career in the Army and served in Operation Desert Storm helping soldiers leave and return on R and R. The other fisher woman on Sunday’s trip was Frankie Page Mayo, who joined the Army out of high school and served from 1980 to ’82.

    Tamara Franklin nodded across the parking lot at Andy Roberts. “He was a captain in Iraq,” she said, her eyes revealing what was left unsaid. “They can learn through fly-fishing to reintegrate to become leaders within the program, get their dignity back. It’s not complicated.”

    The vets said they’d had a great day, but the fishing was not easy. The false albacore that are said to be schooling around Block Island have not arrived in Montauk waters. A favorite of light-tackle and fly-fishing anglers, the “falsies” will soon join striped bass and what Ken Rafferty, a fly guide, called “monster” bluefish to complete the triad of species the light-tackle people target this time of year.

    Rafferty said up until Monday, he had found bluefish in the 10-to-18-pound range in among the rocks of Montauk’s south side. Rafferty moves to Montauk this time of year from his summertime haunts in Gardiner’s Bay.

    “They were hitting poppers only because it seemed to irritate them, instinct, because they were not eating. They seemed to be doing some kind of courting ritual. It was unusual. They usually can eat a seagull.”

    Rafferty said sand eels and silver sides were what he was seeing for prey species and he urged fly fishermen to use a 40-pound test tipit (leader) made of tieable wire to protect their lines from the teeth of big bluefish.

    It promises to be a bountiful fall, with large fluke lurking about, as well as porgies, sea bass, and blues. Fishermen lucky enough to get offshore continue to find yellowfin and bigeye tuna, white marlin, and mahimahi.

    The Montauk SurfMasters tournament for striped bass gets under way on Saturday.

    On Three Mile Harbor on Sunday, younger anglers competed in the Harbor Marina’s 15th annual snapper derby. The overall winner, who also took first in the 13-plus category, was Spencer Kulick, who caught a 6.25-ounce, 10 3/8-inch snapper in Soak Hides Cover with a Kastmaster lure attached to a snapper popper. Also reeling in wins were Rylie Field, in the 3-to-8-year-old category, with a four ounce, 9.25-inch snapper caught at the Three Mile Harbor channel with squid on a snapper hook and Lucas Del Favero, in the 9-to-12 group, with a snapper of the same weight and length caught in Folkstone Cove with a snapper popper.

   Nick Joeckel laughed, sort of, in telling how customs agents shook him down for two brand-new pairs of sunglasses in the Jakarta airport on the way back from a 10-day odyssey during which he surfed some of the best waves on the planet with 10 friends who had dreamed of surfing Indonesia together since they were kids.

    They returned on June 22 bruised and cut from bouncing off the reefs of the Mentawai chain of islands, but with surfing batteries fully charged.

    Except for Java Bailey from Southampton, Matt Clark, a well-known surf photographer, and Joe Mata, a rep for Oakley sunglasses — the company that puts Joeckel in the category of sponsored surfer — the trip was made up of friends, now in their mid-20s, who caught the surf bug at Atlantic Terrace, Ditch Plain, Turtle Cove, and their other hometown Montauk breaks.

    Joeckel, his brother, Jesse (who owns the Whalebone Creative shop on Fort Pond Bay), Tyler Maguire, Charlie Weimar, Patrick Havlik, Kevin Becker, Jason Hewitt, John Wade, Bailey, and Mata are experienced surfers who, for years, had traveled beyond their hometown spots to juicier waves in the Caribbean and Hawaii. Nick Joeckel, Weimar, and Bailey had surfed Indonesia before.

    This time, Joeckel, Maguire, Havlik, Wade, and Becker flew to Bali two weeks before the boat trip. Wade is still in Bali, “gone rogue,” Joeckel said. Wade is a commercial fisherman out of Montauk by trade, as are Joeckel and Weimar.

    “As a group, we all talked about a boat trip to Indo,” Joeckel said, referring to the preferred way to taste the wide variety of waves offered by the reefs located over 50 miles off the coast of Sumatra. Beginning in the 1970s, the area was pioneered by Australian surfers who risked malaria and worse to experience wave perfection.

    The Mentawais are a vast tropical paradise with Indian Ocean temperatures in the mid-80s, equatorial sun, and, other than a few island villagers paddling dugout canoes, little else but natural beauty. A surfari to the islands has become a pilgrimage of sorts for very good surfers, but the islands are in the middle of proverbial nowhere. A serious injury is serious indeed. These days a few resorts that cater to surfers have sprouted up, but boats, some with first-class accommodations, Indonesian crews, excellent food, and bottomless supplies of Bintang beer for apres-surf sunsets, are the way to go.

    “Our boat was the Meleleuca, a 70-foot Indo yacht, first-class with an Australian guide,” Joeckel said. “Yogurt and fruit before our first session, then eggs, then a second session, and lunch, then surf again in the afternoon. Three sessions per day.”

    He said the Meleleuca first called at the area known as Playgrounds, named for the number and variety of waves in close proximity, including Rifles, so-called for the cracking sound a wave makes when its perfectly formed lip hits the reef. Not far away, they caught the wave known as Bank Vaults — “double overhead barrels, a loomy peak,” Joeckel said.

    The boat stayed at Playgrounds for the first three days, then headed south to the infamous wave known as Macaroni’s, perhaps because of the way a surfer can get twisted there. The Montaukers were taken to Greenbush, a wave that’s been surfed for only a few years.

    “Heavy reef-break barrels. You come out of a barrel practically onto dry reef. We had it by ourselves for two days, a big, dredging, spitting barrel. No room for errors, no turns, just go. It’s more of a wedge.”

    Joeckel said that Montauk alone could not prepare a surfer for Indonesia and its particular Indian Ocean long-period pulse. “It’s mellow for a half-hour, and then the pulse” — a big set of waves generated by storms raging near the Antarctic.

    Surfing “front-side” can be a great advantage when waves are steep and barreling, as they are in the most iconic of Indonesian surf spots. The boat visited both lefts and rights, waves that break left-to-right and give goofy-footed surfers (standing with right foot forward and facing the wave) the front-side advantage, and right-to-left breaking waves more comfortable for surfers with the opposite stance. There were seven regular foots, and only three goofys.

    “The name spots like Macaroni’s were crowded, maybe 35 guys in the water, but you still get so many waves. Everyone wanted to surf Lance’s Right, but the winds didn’t agree. Inside, farther into a cove from Lance’s Left, is a spot called Bintangs [after the beer], a novelty wave, a draining right-hand barrel. We had it all to ourselves, every wave a barrel, not giant, real fun. It was at the end of the trip.”

    The heavy waves and sharp coral reefs took their toll, but there were no serious injuries. Wade got his “back ripped like tiger claws on his back,” Joeckel said. “Charlie Weimar hit the reef hard on the second-to-last day at Macaroni’s. We had a first-aid kit on the boat. We went through three bottles of Chinese iodine.”

    The trip to the surf almost exactly on the other side of the world is a two-day affair: New York to Singapore via Frankfurt, Germany, then from Singapore to Jakarta, and finally Jakarta to Padang, Sumatra. Joeckel was the trip organizer, no small task. Getting the group’s money together and making the visa, flight, and boat arrangements was a challenge. And then there was Jakarta.

    “I missed the flight from Indo to Singapore. Got stuck in the Jakarta airport for 12 hours by myself. Got detained by customs. My visa was expired by one day. I had $15 in cash and my credit card. They took me to a back room and closed the doors. They said $15 was not enough. There was no way to get cash from my card. All I had was two new pairs of Oakley sunglasses.”

    Today, there are two customs agents wearing very cool shades, and Nick Joeckel and the boys are already talking about the next surfari to Indonesia.

   The native deer population has been blamed for a lot of things, hosting ticks, causing highway accidents and vehicle damage, eating favorite ornamentals, even defecating on manicured lawns. For several years now deer have also been blamed for removing the underbrush or subshrub groundcover across the South Fork.

    My own casual observations over the years gave reason to question this last accusation. Since 1980 I’ve been keeping track of the condition of the woodland vegetation, not only of the trees, but also of the stuff on the forest floor below their canopies. I have seen the groundcover eaten up firsthand, not by deer but by gypsy moth larvae and canker worms after they’ve finished stripping the trees bare. Several areas on the South Fork still bear the scars of these episodic invasions.

    However, this year the insect gods have been kind, there is very little in the way of defoliation on a grand scale to observe. In fact, and perhaps owing to the generous June rains, the canopies have not looked so full and so lush in many years. Having religiously kept track of the state of the tree foliage in Southampton and East Hampton Towns since the beginning of spring, I decided to take a close look at the groundcover situation.

    So, on Friday and Monday I drove the woodland roads of the two towns, east of Southampton Village and west of Napeague.

    In all, I drove 32 miles of Southampton roads and 35 miles of East Hampton ones, recording the state of the undergrowth as I went. The roads covered a collective area of some 29,500 acres of prime woodlands, including East Hampton’s Northwest white pine and pitch pine forest, the morainal pitch pine and oak forests of Southampton, and those of western East Hampton, in Wainscott, for example. I also cruised the woodlands of Amagansett and Springs north of Montauk Highway.

    I have the following good news regarding forest undergrowth: First of all, let me start out by saying that in my 23 years of roadside observations, I have never seen the groundcovers looking so robust, green, and thick. On my 1-to-10 lushness scale, the groundcovers along the roads I traveled consistently rated 9 and 8.5, that is equally as lush as the canopies in the trees above. Except for a few areas where American beech trees are dominant, such as along Old Stone Highway between Amagansett and Springs, where the ground was almost devoid of cover save for the leaves, the floor of every pineland and oakland forest were 30 to 100 percent covered with huckleberries and lowbush blueberries. The average coverage was about 80 percent.

    Similarly, there were no signs of the viral disease that four and five years ago had wiped out many patches of them as well as mountain laurels. The leaves were almost 100 percent green. In a few spots that had been the hardest smitten by gypsy moths, such as along Hand’s Creek and Daniel’s Hole Roads and Stephen Hands Path, all in East Hampton, as much as 40 percent of the groundcover was composed of a 12-inch-high layer of Pennsylvania sedge, another native and the most common sedge species on Long Island. It had come to the ravaged woodlands’ aid after the tree, huckleberry, and blueberry leaves were eaten up by the caterpillar attack of 2000 and 2001.

    As I had hypothesized, there were very few signs of deer.

    What was especially pleasing to discover after two days of driving here and there in near 90-degree weather was that the “water recharge” and “aquifer protection” areas of East Hampton and Southampton, respectively, were almost completely intact. The East Hampton ones were established in 1983. Without the groundcover and the turf layer to filter and remove nitrogen products and other pollutants, the groundwater reserves sequestered in our two potable aquifers, the upper glacial and magothy, would be much less pure than they are today. The administrations in both towns in the 1980s were smart-thinking and smart-acting. Bravo East Hampton and Southampton!

    At least for the moment, one of the most serious charges against deer is off the table. In all fairness to Odocoileus virginianus, shouldn’t we re-examine the others more carefully?

    It’s likely we were put on this earth, or, depending on your point of view, we evolved on this earth, for no other reason than to bear witness. Homo sapiens seem to have no other meaningful purpose. From a global point of view, we tend to muddle things up when we act. Best to just keep our hands in our pockets and watch and, as a few East End witnesses did this past week, marvel.

    “You know, I look out at the ocean all the time from here and think about the whales and all the fish out there, but that day, they all came to greet me. Everything came to the surface,” Dalton Portella said on Monday afternoon from his lawn across Old Montauk Highway from the sea, still excited for having “eaten the marrow” out of July 17.

    Portella, a surfer, photographer, paint­er, and musician, went on a shark-cage dive on July 17 with Chuck Wade of Sea Turtle Dive Charters, which operates out of the West Lake Marina in Montauk. It was one of the final days of the seven-day heat wave. The temperature on land was in the 90s. Offshore was a bit cooler, but still tropical. The charter boat drove 25 miles south of Montauk Point on a flat sea that does not get any calmer.

    “First we saw fin whales and lots of dolphins that came and rode the bow wave. Chuck Wade said fishermen had seen humpback whales breaching left and right off Shinnecock. I was in the cabin of the boat and had just finished a cage dive.” He was about to witness something amazing.

    The shark dive had been a success. The cage, firmly attached to the boat, accommodates two divers at a time and is equipped with air tanks for breathing. Three large blue sharks circled the cage and Portella, using a waterproof GoPro camera, documented their sinuous passes for a series of watercolors he’s been working on. “I had just finished the dive, looked out the window and saw a humpback breaching. I grabbed my camera, went out on the deck and yelled, ‘Do that again!’ ”

    “And it did. Absolutely spectacular. I was in heaven. There were two out there, frolicking, slapping the surface, mating I think.” Portella caught the humpback’s launch, slow roll with its long, white pectoral fins spread wide, and its awesome splashdown. A large shark, probably a mako, was also seen flying out of the water during the trip.

    Montauk’s Viking Fleet of party boats, in cooperation with the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island, or CRESLI, has been running whale watch trips on Sundays, and whale witnesses have not been disappointed. 

    Closer to shore the next day, Nick Adams was paddling his standup board in the ocean off Wiborg Beach in East Hampton, looked down and witnessed a stingray at least six feet long and later another he estimated to be longer than his paddleboard, over nine feet. “They seemed happy basking on the sandy bottom in about four feet of water. I’m no fish expert, but I think they were roughtail stingrays,” Adams reported.

     Big manta-like rays are known to visit this area right about now and have been seen in Fort Pond Bay in Montauk this time of year. The roughtails grow to over 600 pounds.

    Also in the look-but-don’t-touch department, a reminder that the SharkEye two-day, no-kill tournament and festival will get under way from the Montauk Marine Basin on Saturday. Brooks and Sean Paxton, known as the Shark Brothers, will be on and will hold a number of educational forums under the tent. Scott Curatola-Wegemann, a scientist with Cornell Cooperative Extension and a shark-attack victim, will talk about why protecting sharks is so important.

    Four of the sharks caught within a proscribed area will be outfitted with GPS tags so they can be tracked via satellite on home computers.

    As Portella said, they all “came to the surface” last week, including a l86-pound bluefin tuna caught aboard Capt. Harry Garrecht’s Breakwater boat. Bill Parmenter angled the fish. It was weighed at the Star Island Marina. 

    Feeding bluefin and feeding whales are often seen together, as happened last week from here to Nantucket. This season’s profusion of sand eels, high on the menus of whales, tuna, dolphin, and a glut of other species, could be the reason for the offshore feast. As this reporter has speculated before, the constant west winds during late spring and early summer, winds that push nutrients out to sea from coastal rivers, could explain the gathering of species including the inhabitants of Gulf Stream eddies and meanders.

    Striped bass continue to be caught on clam baits along Napeague and Amagansett beaches, porgies are getting fatter and fatter in Gardiner’s Bay, the snapper blues are growing in Accabonac Harbor, and there has been a school of very large bluefish around the Ruins on the north side of Gardiner’s Island. Buoy number two has been a hot spot for fluke of late, according to Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett. Can I get a witness?

   As you ride along some of our scenic routes where you used to be able to get a good look at the water, be it a pond water, the ocean, a bay, or a creek water, you will often find the view obscured by one of the world’s tallest grasses, the common reed, or phragmites. Linnaeus himself in the mid-1700s first described the reed and gave it its first scientific name, the binomen Arundo phragmites, one of thousands he created. Phragmites stems from the Greek for “growing in hedges,” and describes its tendency to form vegetative walls that block the view.

    Such occlusive walls can presently be seen in all their summer glory in Montauk along Old West Lake Drive adjacent to Lake Montauk, along Industrial Road on the north end of Fort Pond, and around Tuthill Pond, just to the northeast of Fort Pond. They are also growing heartily around the back side of Fresh Pond in Amagansett, along Albert’s Landing Road, along Old Stone Highway bordering Accabonac Harbor in Springs, on the north side of Soak Hides Road at the south end of Three Mile Harbor, between Scoy Pond stream and Ely Brook Pond, along Alewife Brook Road in Northwest, then again, on both sides of Northwest Creek and on both sides of Little Northwest Creek as ones drives to the Sag Harbor Golf Course from Route 114 in Sag Harbor.

    The State Department of Environmental Conservation says in no uncertain terms that we can’t touch these tall, thick hedges without a permit, which can cost up to $800 and take years to acquire. That’s because the state’s tidal and freshwater wetlands regulations, written in the early 1970s, considered phragmites, then known as Phragmites australis, to be a native wetland species ranking right up there with the likes of sacrosanct saltmarsh cordgrass and cattails. Since the early 1970s, this so-called native has been taking over wetlands throughout Long Island and much of eastern North America. It has shown itself to be a real bully, but not a “weed” because it was believed to be native, found in all of the lower 48.

    Then along comes a young Yaley named Kristin Saltonstall in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who, using genomic analysis, discovers, “Hey, this thing isn’t native at all; it’s an immigrant from Eurasia.” Ha, ha, the thing we began to hate but couldn’t because it was as American as apple pie, was really a dreadful interloper from abroad. This same woman, now Dr. Kristin Saltonstall of the University of Maryland, went on to describe a native American phragmites, Phragmites americanus, with the help of fellow botanists, but it is very rare, having been overshadowed by the undocumented alien, a very close lookalike.

    Arthur Haines’s “Flora Novae Angliae,” published by the Yale University Press in 2011, has finally put the nail in the coffin. You can tell the bad guy phragmites by its darker to grayish-green leaves, its dull, ridged stem joints (called internodes), and the many fine parallel ridges running along the stem from bottom to top. Aha, I thought, I bet what I have been looking at and scratching my head over for so many years on the South Fork and other parts of Long Island is not the native, but the evil intruder.

    So on Monday I started in Montauk on East Lake Drive and made 13 stops on the way back to Sag Harbor along all of those roads and water bodies listed above to take samples from and photograph the different stands. Wouldn’t you just know it: All of the phragmites at the 13 different sites were Eurasian in origin. They all had those attributes described by Haines and Saltonstall. In other words, because we failed to look below the surface or couldn’t because of technical difficulties (DNA and other molecular analyses to differentiate plants is fairly new), we have been snookered by this wolf in lamb’s clothing, Phragmites australis.

    While in Eurasia some natural enemies have been keeping it at bay, to the extent that it has even become rare in parts of Europe, here it shows no signs of faltering on its march to the sea. The only American phragmites I have ever seen was in Florida, but there are still small patches of it here and there in New England and northeastern Canada, say, Nova Scotia. Both species have a clever way of reproducing themselves, not so much by spreading seed, but by rhizomic extension, i.e., cloning, the way that American beeches, quaking aspens, sumacs, and a host of other native species choose to spread.

    In this respect, the Eurasian species far outguns its American cousin. It can send it rhizomes out 20 to 30 feet over land until the tip reaches the water. The elongate rhizome can put up a shoot every six inches or so. The American version is not so greedy and distributes its offspring much more sparsely.

    Phragmites isn’t all bad. It does remove nitrogen, which would otherwise enter the waterways, from the soil. On the other hand, the relationship between the native eelgrass and foreign phragmites is of interest and needs to be studied more. In those parts of the Peconic Estuary in East Hampton Town, wherever phragmites forms area-wide stands such as at Northwest Creek, Accabonac Harbor, and Fresh Pond, Amagansett, eelgrass has practically disappeared. Along the banks of Napeague Harbor and, to a lesser extent, along those of Lake Montauk, there is not much phragmites and eelgrass is still making a go of it on the bottoms of those water bodies.

    On Monday, I started with East Lake Drive because it is the home of a pond built in 1910 on land donated to the Town of East Hampton. After the pond was done in early summer and the Eurasian phragmites began to make a serious comeback, I cut all of the phragmites on the north side of the pond on more than one occasion. I was proceeding according to a hypothesis recently construed by Karen Blumer, the Long Island author of “Growing Wild,” a book about getting rid of invasives and bringing back native plants on Long Island. The hypothesis simply states that you don’t have to replant with natives once you remove the invasives (or in my case, cut them to the ground); the natives will come back on their own. What did I find? Three years after my first phragmites cutting, and almost two years without subsequent cuttings, I went to look: “My God,” I thought, “Karen’s hypothesis seems to be ringing true.”

    On the south side of Bond’s Pond, named for the man who donated the land, there was a magnificent hedge of foreign phragmites, while on the north side there were native sedges, rushes, verbenas, alders, goldenrods, at least 30 different native wetland and near-wetland species flourishing along with a few straggly phragmites of foreign extraction.

    So let us not wring our hands about people cutting phragmites. They are freeing the wetland edges for the comeback of true natives such as the marsh hibiscus, blue flag, and other American pretties, and maybe in time our own Phragmites Americans. People of the South Fork unite: Hew down bad phragmites, free the wetlands from their stranglehold, validate Blumer’s hypothesis.

   It’s a jungle out there and I don’t mean New York City at night, I mean out there out here. Whether you walk in the woods or through an old field, try to catch a clam or two with your toes, or sit outside at night under the starry sky, at this time of year there is always something lurking, ready to unsettle you.

    Plants don’t bite, but they can be the most menacing of all the lurkers. Poison ivy, or P.I., as it is known to campers, is one of our most common native plants and probably the most feared. I don’t get poison ivy, but I am one of a very small minority that is immune. There isn’t a native or home garden habitat around that doesn’t have a poison ivy plant or two. You can recognize it by its three shiny leaflets in a kind of rosette, but you don’t always see the leaves, and just scraping an ankle or wrist over the bare vines is enough to cause a major eruption.

    Fortunately, poison ivy’s closest local relative, poison sumac, is quite uncommon and you’re not apt to find it on dry land. It’s an obligate wetland species. If you are allergic to poison ivy, then you will be even more allergic to poison sumac. One sumac looks like another and the area is loaded with sumacs of three species, but these harmless ones are all upland plants. Some, like the shining, or winged, sumac, are even grown as ornamentals in estate gardens. Stay out of swamps and you will probably never come in contact with the dangerous variety.

    The stinging nettle is an attractive plant that even invites you to touch it or pick it up. I had my first stinging nettle experience when I was about 13 years old near Saratoga, upstate. It was my last because I learned quickly by way of the so-called trial and error method; I have never touched a stinging nettle since. Fortunately for us on Long Island they are very uncommon, but that may be temporary, as they are widespread in North America.

    Other common local plants that can give some the itchies via contact are the native Virginia creeper and the alien but well naturalized tree-of-heaven. But wait, there is now a new kid on the block, one that can cause not only itching but very serious side effects like vomiting. It’s the giant hogweed, another alien that is rapidly becoming established on Long Island and, in the past two or three years, on the South Fork. If it’s in your neighborhood you can hardly miss it. It gets up to 10 feet tall at maturity with an umbel of small whitish flowers (not unlike the flowering head of Queen Anne’s lace, which is harmless) and its leaves are as large a rhubarb leaves. If you see it, give it a wide berth and report it to a plant person. The last ones I spied locally were on the edge of the cul-de-sac at Quarty Circle in East Hampton and on the shoulder of Daniel’s Hole Road next to Daniel’s Hole, also in East Hampton.

    In order to be victimized by most of our poisonous plants, you have to ingest them. Generally, it’s the attractive fruits that are toxic, but in some, such as pokeweed, it’s the foliage. Just because catbirds and a few other fruit-eating birds are able to eat the fruit does not mean you should try it. It could make you very sick. The fruit of the deadly nightshade, a climbing vine in the tomato family, is black and iridescent, about the size of blueberries. Very tempting, but even the birds quickly learn to stay away from it.

    Like the nightshade, datura, or “locoweed,” is also quite toxic, but its seeds, borne on silky thread in golf-ball sized pebbly pods developing from large white flowers, are the most so. These weeds from the Southwest kill cattle, they also make humans high (before they kill them, too). Datura comes and goes. It grows around the public ocean parking lot in Sagaponack in different years also in the fields along Route 114 north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks from time to time.

    Sheep laurel is a close relative of mountain laurel. It’s a low shrub and not nearly as common as the other. Its foliage is quite poisonous and deer leave it alone. Since most of us modern humans have lost the arts of hunting and gathering, we are not likely to eat sheep laurel leaves if we come across them, and even less likely to eat the evergreen periwinkle leaves in our gardens, which are equally toxic.

    And it is not very likely that we will feed on milkweeds or closely related dogbanes, the white milky sap of which would do many of us in if we ate it. You will find very few herbivores in nature eating either of these two, yet the larvae of red-and-black milkweed beetles thrive on them, as do the caterpillars of the monarch butterfly.

    Mushrooms plucked from the forest floor can be very tasty and nutritious, but the flesh of a single destroying angel, Amanita phalloides, could kill an entire family. Around the world, 50 to 100 human deaths a year are attributed to eating poisonous fungi.

    Then there are the blue-green algae in Mill Pond, Water Mill, and Agawam Pond in Southampton Village that we’ve been reading about, which are very poisonous to some organisms. I think I’ll pass on eating any and will confine my algae eating to sea lettuce, Ulva lactuca, fresh out of the creek.

    Oh, yes, I forgot to mention goats. Curiously, they can eat poison ivy and many other poisonous plants without suffering even a faint spasm. What is it about goats? I’d like to know. Unless you’re a Capricorn, beware; it’s a jungle out there.