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.

    The party on the banks of Fort Pond Bay in Montauk Sunday celebrated the rescue of John Aldridge after his surviving 12 hours at sea over 30 miles offshore with the help of buoyant rubber boots. He was known as Johnny Load, a nickname with undefined coinage. He is now known as Johnny Boots.

    Anna Mary, the lobster boat he fell from on July 24, supplied what seemed like an endless supply of lobsters for the party. She was anchored just offshore and her back deck provided the stage for music by the band Jettycoon. Members of the Montauk community chip­ped in for the barbecue pig, beer, hot dogs, burgers, salad, etc. The sun that dramatically reappeared after a violent, rain-filled squall seemed a fitting conclusion to a week and a half full of both fear and great joy.

    The joy in Montauk Harbor was short-lived. Word came yesterday morning that Capt. Fred E. Bird has passed over the bar. A complete obituary will appear in an upcoming edition of The Star. Captain Bird, at the helm of the Flying Cloud party boat for decades, was a gentleman and a jazz aficionado. His customers were treated to the sounds of big-band swing music while they fished. He will be sorely missed.

    Weakfish continue to be caught by surfcasters along Ditch Plain Beach in Montauk, as well as striped bass on both bait and lures. There are so many sand eels in the area that swimmers are seeing them in the surf. This could bode well for the fall surfcasting season.

    “Hey, I think that’s a seal looking at us,” Ken Rafferty, a fly-fishing and light-tackle guide, said yesterday morning from an undisclosed location in Gardiner’s Bay where his clients were busy catching small striped bass.

    “The weird part is we’ve had a month of being able to catch and release a hundred bluefish, but now I don’t know where they’ve gone. The west wind has made the water murky,” he said, murky but full of bait including sand eels and something that looks like bay anchovies. “Also a lot of seals, which maybe explains the lack of bluefish,” Rafferty said.

    In the sailing department, Sail Montauk is holding Tuesday night regattas. The organization has four Catalina 22s with three crew positions on each boat. No experience is necessary and each boat has a licensed skipper aboard. Supporters can watch the races from the October Rose, Montauk’s water taxi. The cost is $95 per person.

    The first launch leaves the Montauk Yacht Club at 6 p.m. Reservations can be made by calling 522-5183. The Montauk Chamber of Commerce is offering the second season of its Take a Kid Fishing program. The harbor’s captains and mates are prepared to take kids ages 6 to 16 offshore to learn how to bait, hook, and clean their catch. Fishing equipment, bait, and life jackets are provided. Kids on a boat for the first time will fish for free. Their accompanying adults are charged $10.

    The expeditions will take place on various dates this month starting on Monday. Reservations are being accepted on Monday afternoon at the chamber office on Main Street, Montauk, or by e-mailing [email protected].

    “Moooooooooooo,” was what Brian Ritter heard when he answered the phone at 4 in the morning one week ago. He recognized the voice, and he needed no translation. It was Mike Coppola telling him he’d caught a big cow, a female of the species Morone saxatilis, a striped bass.

    Both men are among the diehard surf­casters who participate in the Montauk SurfMasters spring and fall tournaments, emphasis on the diehard. It is not unusual for the hardcore to cast for five, six, even eight hours at a stretch. According to Fred (Eelman) Kalkstein, an organizer of the annual tests, the fishing that took place from Friday through the weekend was about as hardcore as it gets; fishermen casting for hours without a bite, casting until the cows came home.

    On Friday morning two big fish were weighed in at Paulie’s Tackle shop. Coppolla and John Bruno knocked Jason Pecoraro and Mike Larson off the leader board with two cows taken just minutes apart in the wee hours of the night. Bruno fed an eel to a 41.24-pound bass that took the third place spot and Coppola, “clearly the better looking of the two,” if the author of the tournament’s updated standings did say so himself “drilled a 46.5-pound fish on a Superstrike needle lure. Coppola’s fish knocked Ben McCarron’s 44.74-pound bass into second place. But wait.

    According to Coppola’s narrative, “the action drove everyone into the suds on Friday night with the promise of landing a cow bass. Mary Ellen Kane and Gary Krist took fish on both sides of Montauk Point in the low 30s, but not big enough to take over the leaderboard. Mary Ellen Kane’s 32-pound fish was a personal best. She took the fish on the north side. She said, ‘I just threw it out and he was right there.’ ”

    Things were looking good for angler Coppola, but, in the light of the moon that was as close to Earth as it will be for some time, Billy Jakobs waded into the surf on Saturday night and found a 48.7-pound cow with a darter lure on the north side of the Point. The tournament ends at 10 a.m. on Saturday.

    Why have there been so many big cow bass this spring? The entire explanation remains a mystery — probably a good thing — but for whatever reason the prey species known as sand eels plays a big role, as does the appearance of menhaden. Both species are high on the menu for our larger predators.

    “There seem to be more sand eels than usual for June,” said Chris Miller of the West Lake Marina in Montauk. It probably explained the 70-pound cow bass that a spear-fishing friend said was caught off Block Island in recent days. “They are getting them in the dark. There were no sand eels in the bays for netters to catch to sell for fluke bait earlier,” Miller said. “Now they’re coming in from the ocean,” Miller said of the sand eels. “Umbrella rigs work when the sand eels are around. The Adios [charter boat] had a 52-pounder on an umbrella over Father’s Day weekend.”

    Tuna like sand eels too, and Miller said there had been a few bluefin tuna sightings offshore. The cock rattle has a 140-pound bluefin caught off Shinnecock within the past week.

    The sand eel bounty can also explain the “spectacular fluke bite” that Miller said took place over the weekend east of Montauk Point, while boats that traveled to fluke grounds south and west of Montauk were “dogged up,” cursed with dogfish.

    Miller reported that sand eels were swarming inside Montauk Harbor around the West Lake Marina and Star Island. This and the hatch of cinder worms that occurs in early summer around the full moon can bring both striped bass and fluke within range of local docks. “I used to do it at night as a kid, cast out a sand worm with a bobber down by the yacht club. The cinder worms cause a big ruckus at night.”

    Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reported “sand eels all over the place, and stripers caught on clam baits by the Napeague Lane road end in Beach Hampton, also on diamond jigs. Everything is working, big porgies at the number two buoy off Napeague, and squid made another showing over the weekend. Three Mile Harbor has been hot for bluefish up to six pounds, and Accabonac is the hot spot for fluke. The fluke are all keeper size, 21 inches and up.”

    Ken Rafferty, light spin-tackle and fly-fishing guide, reports productive fly-fishing for striped bass off Big and Little Gull Islands with “lots of bluefish, 6 to 10 pounds around Gardiner’s Bay. I hope this heat doesn’t chase them away.”

    The sloop Leilani was able to strut her stuff in the 20-knot westerly wind on Saturday under reefed mainsail and jib from Montauk Harbor to Gardiner’s Island. The plan was to return from the sail in order to attend the “paddle-out” for Jeb Stuart, a surfing buddy, friend, former Coast Guardsman, lobsterman, and merchant seaman. He died in April at the age of 52.

    A paddle-out is a funeral of sorts, a tradition among surfers that began in Hawaii. Friends paddle out beyond the breaking waves, form a circle, often with one or two in the center of the circle to offer the ashes of their departed water brother or sister to the sea along with flower leis.

    This is what happened on Saturday afternoon in front of the Atlantic Terrace resort in downtown Montauk. The Terrace is a surf spot that Stuart lived for in his youth.

    Leilani was running late on the sail back from Gardiner’s Island and her captain was feeling anxious about missing the paddle-out, anxious until Jeb Stuart slapped him upside the head. The sailor would miss seeing his old friends, miss the aloha, but he would not miss Jeb. Jeb was sitting right next to him at the helm, at sea, under sail, and always would be.

   The Sunday Newsday crossword puzzle requested a five-letter word for “swamp plant.” I’ve been doing all of the Newsday and New York Times crosswords, seven days a week, since the early 1980s. In other words, I’ve done thousands of crosswords and saved them all. Whether a given puzzle over the years has requested a substitute for swamp plant, marsh plant, or bog plant, the only three answers I’ve encountered are two four-letter words, “rush” and “reed,” and the five-letter one asked for on Sunday, “sedge.” There are many other wetland plant types, but for obvious reasons these are the three that the solver fills in the squares with over and over again.

    Sunday’s “sedge” answer was particularly apropos as I had just come back on Thursday from a three-day sedge workshop at Morrisville State College in western New York hosted by the New York Flora Association. I went with two fellow enthusiasts, Karen Blumer and Victoria Bustamante. Those two stayed with the sedge master and the other 15 or so participants through thick and thin, wet and dry. I lasted until Thursday morning — sedges coming out of each ear and clogging my brain — but had to throw in the towel early.

    Why sedges? Well, sedges may be the most nondescript and the most numerous wetland group in the world. At the moment there are more than 2,000 sedge species worldwide, all in the genus Carex. Several new ones are described by botanists each year, and there are still many more to discover. Not counting the varieties, there are some 218 different sedges in New York State, less than 10 of which are considered aliens. What makes individual sedges the most difficult of the higher plants to identify is the fact that to almost everybody, including most botanists, they all look alike. To the layperson, they are easily confused with rushes and grasses. Only the very brave or very peculiar botanist dares take them on.

    They differ from rushes and grasses and almost all other higher plant groups in one very important respect — they lack sepals and petals. The female seed is housed in a tiny saclike structure called a perigynium seated at the base of a covering scale, several female flowers make up a spike. The male flowers occur on the same stem, often in a separate inflorescence, but in a few species the male and female flowers are dioecious, they occur on separate plants, as in hollies, sassafras, and many other flowering plants.

    Like pines, cottonwoods, willow, oaks and many other tree species, sedges are almost invariably wind-pollinated, thus it helps to have both female and male flowers close to each other.

    The South Fork is species-rich in sedges — more occur here than perhaps any other part of Long Island — and has some of the rarest in New York State such as the state-threatened seorse sedge, Emmon’s sedge, and lupuliniform sedge. Montauk, with its plethora of wetlands of many different kinds, is the sedgiest place on Long Island and maybe even in the state or country. Ironically, our most common sedge on Long Island is a dry-land sedge, Carex pensylvanica, Pennsylvania sedge. It’s that low, grassy-looking stuff you see in oak woods, say along Hand’s Creek Road in Northwest. It becomes the common ground cover during gypsy moth caterpillar infestations. The light falls on its leaves in buckets in the absence of oak leaves.

    Although there are several upland sedges, some that grow in dry woods, others in dry fields, sedges are the most common wetland species. The wetland ones are almost all confined to freshwater wetlands, but a few grow at the upper edges of salt marshes such as around Lake Montauk.

    The word sedge derives from the Old English word, “sagu,” for saw. Many sedges have leaves and stems with fine saw-tooth edges. Some can give you a nasty cut if you rub against them with bare legs. Ticks are also fond of questing on the stems and leaves of some upland sedges, as they do on upland grasses. Many sedges have stem cross-sections that are triangular in outline. A few sedges have stems, or culms, that are succulent at their bases, as are several grasses, and can be chewed and sucked on.

    I lugged a big book up to the workshop that had all of the North American sedges in it with illustrations of many of them. Our sedge meister was Antonio Reznisek from the University of Michigan. He knew just about every sedge in the world. While he was helping ID some of the ones we collected, I opened the book to the Carex section. Guess what? The sedge section was co-authored by none other than the same Mr. Reznisek. A coincidence, don’t you think?

    But I was happy to get home. My brain was filled with this and that Carex name and had stopped working altogether. It cleared by Sunday, just in time to correctly answer the five-letter word for swamp plant in the Newsday crossword, S E D G E.

   The recent passing of the bayman Wayne Vorpahl at the age of 49 caused this observer to mourn the loss to the community of people whose lives and livelihoods depended on an understanding of nature’s rhythms.

    Wayne knew where the clams were and why. He knew where the bass were and why. Same with crabs and oysters and striped bass and any of the creatures we share this place with.

    I would love to have asked him or Stuart Lester or Norman Edwards or Capt. Bill Lester or Tommy Lester or Calvin Lester or any of the other lifelong inshore fisherman who have passed over the bar if there is anything to my theory that fishing seasons like this one, filled with wet weather and strong west winds, are especially bountiful.

    I believe that rain, when accompanied by strong west winds in spring, causes rivers along the East Coast to swell and pour a surfeit of nutrients into the sea. Phytoplankton consume it, little fish swarm to feed on the salad, bigger fish eat the little fish, and the rest is Darwin. Millions of signs and triggers that add up to the East End being swarmed by prey and predator.

    It seems that sand eels make an especially strong presence under these conditions, as they have this year. Sand eels draw all kinds of predators including marine mammals.

    Paul Bruno is the skipper of the Elizabeth II charter boat out of the Montauk Marine Basin. He reported huge schools of tinker mackerel offshore. “If you could get a net on them you would be a fluke magician,” he said. The tiny mackerel are tops in the fluke boat department. He said the tinkers and the massive schools of sand eels farther inshore explained the dolphins he’s been seeing and the whales that others have reported. “There’s got to be bluefin in the area,” he said, meaning bluefin tuna.

    Could this wet west wind-Gulf Stream phenomenon account for the presence of Portuguese man-of-war? Several of these jellyfish cousins have been seen washed up on East Hampton Town beaches in the last week.

    As Captain Bruno said, these are excellent conditions for shark fishing. Three very large makos topped the scales at the Montauk Marine Basin’s 43rd annual shark tag tournament over the weekend. Capt. Chuck Mallinson’s Joy Sea charter boat got the biggest, with the able help of the angler Rich Lipari of Katonah, N.Y. — a 377-pound mako. In second place was a 295-pound mako wrestled aboard the My Mate with Pete Casale at the helm. That fish was angled by Ray Ristau. Capt. Tony Froitzheim took the Montrachet offshore where Peter Pappas reeled in a 292.2-pound mako.

    The top blue shark was a 239-pounder caught on the Pension Plan from Connecticut. Capt. Tom Cusimano’s Sea Wife IV took second with a 233.6-pound blue with another Connecticut boat, the White Hawk, as the runner up. The largest thresher shark was caught on Capt. Peter Brancaleone’s Fish On boat.

    There is another, and probably related, explanation. If you check the Web site of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, you will see that the Gulf Stream and its warm-core eddies and meanders have begun to flood us with very warm water. Big predators like tuna and billfish travel within the Stream’s hospitable cocoons, which bring them within range of more northern prey, and of more northern fishermen.

    “We got fish up the ass,” was how Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett put it. “When we were kids I used to go tinker mackerel fishing in the ocean first thing in the morning and fry them in the pan,” he said in response to Captain Bruno’s offshore observation.

    “A lot of 24 to 29-inch striped bass off Barnes Landing. A lot of porgies and fluke off Cartwright Shoals and Napeague. Napeague Harbor is holding small bass and bluefish. The hangar dock in Fort Pond Bay [Montauk] is hot for porgies and small bass. Some people have been jigging squid down there too, as well as in Three Mile Harbor at night. The Georgica jetties have a lot of bass, and Georgica Pond has some nice size crabs starting. The blues are off Sammy’s Beach and the ocean beaches in East Hampton and Amagansett are still hot. Diamond jigs and clam bait are working best.”

    “There are a lot of fish for all, lots of fun. Snapper, bluefish at least two weeks early,” Mr. Bennett ranted. “Cloudy skies make for perfect fishing weather. Fishing the shoals is so much like the flats of the Caribbean that you get lost in between the fish and the U.F.O.s flying by. Happy Fourth.” He also mentioned that bike riders can expect free water and repairs at his shop on Montauk Highway.

   What happened to all the turtles? Of all the years since 1974 that I’ve been riding the roads and watching out for them, this is the year I’ve seen the fewest.

    The two species that regularly cross roads in late May and June, the eastern box turtle and snapping turtle have been few and far between. I have yet to count a single turtle roadkill in 2013.

    Long Island has seven native turtles and three or four let-goes. Five of them are aquatic, the rarest of which is the mud turtle. It is found here and there, primarily in wetlands near the bays and tidal creeks. Robbins Island has a small population. The next rarest is the spotted turtle. The New York State spotted turtles are concentrated on the South Fork, particularly on Napeague and in Montauk.

    The most common aquatic turtles are the painted turtle and snapping turtle. Almost every pond has both, or, if not, one or the other. Painted turtles are the ones with the glossy black shells that you see sunning themselves along banks or on partially submerged logs. You rarely see more than the large head of the snapping turtle as it silently lurks below the surface, but during the egg-laying season, mid-May to mid-June, you will often see one of these 20-pounders, invariably a female, sluggishly crossing a back road on its way from her watering hole to a spot of sandy land to dig in with her hind feet and lay 5 to 10 eggs, then cover them up with loose soil using the same feet she dug with.

    The gravid snapping turtle may travel hundreds of yards to find the right spot, while the gravid painted turtle generally travels less than 50 feet before ovipositing.

    Two more amphibious turtles occur throughout Long Island — the musk turtle, which is sort of a tree or low-bush climber of freshwater pond edges, and the diamondback terrapin, the only marine turtle to breed on Long Island shores. The former has been known to drop into passing canoes and kayaks when dislodged from a sunning spot. The latter rarely ventures out into deep waters, say, like green turtles, loggerheads, ridleys, and leatherbacks, the largest of all turtles, but instead sticks to tidal creeks, bays, brackish lagoons, and the like. Females generally lay their eggs on sandy spits or low dunes along the Peconic and Great South Bays, but almost never on ocean beaches.

    The native qualifications of another amphibious turtle, the red-bellied turtle, are in question in the same way that mountain lions are in northern New England and New York. Only a trained herpetologist is allowed to make the call on the redbelly, but several lay sightings have been reported. One of them, a female laying eggs in the Long Pond Greenbelt main trail, was photographed by Jean Held, a naturalist, several years back. Chris Chapin, Brian Frank, and I have all observed red-bellied turtles on the South Fork at one time or another. They look like large painted turtles but are reddish on the plastron, or bottom shell, instead of yellowish.

    Then there are the sliders and red-eared turtles that have been purchased from pet dealers and let lose in Long Island waters by the carload. They are more southern in natural distribution, but seem to do as well here as the natives. Town Pond and Hook Pond in East Hampton have their share of these two let-goes, as do Lake Agawam in Southampton Village and Mill Pond in Water Mill.

    The eggs that are laid in the late spring don’t usually hatch out until mid-fall. In many cases the hatchling box turtles and diamondbacks don’t leave their underground cribs until the following spring when the ground warms up. If, while walking along, you see a little group of pearly white bead-sized thin shells in the open, it is a good bet that you are looking at the remains of a predated nest. Raccoons are particularly fond of turtle eggs and are able to smell them out. Since, by modern day accounts, raccoons are locally much more common than box turtles and diamondbacks, it is believed that the majority of turtle eggs are plundered prior to hatching out.    Snappers and diamondbacks are gastronomic favorites of various ethnic groups. The former is the only one that prays on baby ducks, geese, and swans in addition to fish and other aquatic organisms. It can bite off your little toe or pinky in the wink of an eye. When trying to save one from becoming a roadkill, it should only be approached from behind and even then very carefully.

    The lack of box turtle sightings on the highways and byways this year might be a good sign that somehow, they have learned to stay away from roads, or a bad sign that there are fewer and fewer of them around with each passing generation. The first hypothesis is unlikely. Since box turtles have been known to outlive humans, and live as long as crocodiles, i.e., to become centenarians, it is a great tragedy when one is removed from the population. Like horseshoe crabs, but much younger evolutionarily, they are well protected by their shells in nature.

    Moreover, unlike most turtles, they can completely secure themselves inside their shells, as the front part of their plastron is hinged and fits tightly, almost hermetically, against the forward under-edge of the carapace.

    If box turtles could speak our language they could tell us a few amazing things, no doubt, like the time one out-legged a hare in a foot race.

   Twisted in rope and moving with difficulty, a leatherback turtle, estimated at 600 pounds, was rescued by the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and U.S. Coast Guard last Thursday.

   The struggling turtle had been spotted in Gardiner’s Bay by a boater aboard the Madeline, from Quonset, R.I., who alerted Coast Guard Station Montauk, according to a statement released on Friday by the foundation.

   Kimberly Durham, the foundation’s rescue director, and Julika Wocial, its rescue program supervisor, were taken aboard a Coast Guard vessel and whisked to where the animal was ensnared. By about 8:10 p.m., the team managed to untangle the rope from around its flippers, and it swam free, apparently none the worse for the experience. The rescues took place about 1.8 miles west of Gardiner’s Island.

    Ms. Durham said in the statement that July was just the start of the sea turtle season in Long Island waters and asked that the public report any sightings to the foundation’s 24-hour hotline, 369-9829.   

   What’s with the wind? It has come out of the west and southwest every day for the past two weeks now. A southwest wind prevails this time of year, but not at 20-knots plus, and not with so much accent on the westerly component. The pattern has kept small-boat operators at bay, especially in the afternoon.

    “Basically what we’ve had is a large Bermuda high over the Atlantic Ocean. We are on the western side of that pressure system. High-pressure systems rotate clockwise, so we’ve had prolonged westerly winds. Usually they don’t hang around this long. It moved offshore early last week, but then moved back toward the eastern seaboard again by late last week into this week,” Joe Pollina, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said Tuesday morning. The system would remain stationary until today, he said, predicting that a welcome cold front could move in by this afternoon.

    In keeping with the old dockside saw, “when the wind is from the west the fishin’s best. When it’s from the east fishin’ least,” the fishing has remained productive for the most part, although the new moon seems to have slowed the striped bass fishing, especially for those casting into the surf.

    At the same time, a new school of large striped bass has moved into the area, according to Rob Aaronson, veteran captain of the Oh Brother charter boat. The Oh Bro ties up at Salivar’s Dock in Montauk, where Captain Aaronson was preparing hooks for a trip early Tuesday morning. Around him, customers were boarding the Ebb Tide, Lazy Bones, Flying Cloud, and Viking party boats bound for the fluke grounds.

    Asked how the fluke were biting, Capt. Fred E. Bird of the Flying Cloud answered, “With their mouths.” Asked the same question, Freddie Shea, a mate with the Viking Fleet, said the fluke were so big “they have claws.” Both answers that can be translated as “fluke fishing is good, not great, certainly not bad, and only God knows what the day will bring.”

    As for catching customers, Captain Aaronson said this season had been different. “We had a very good spring, but summer customers are not booking far in advance like they used to. We have fill-ins,” he said, meaning anglers who decide to go fishing at the last minute. And, he said there were relatively few tourist anglers, “maybe because they can’t find accommodations, or they are too expensive. Most seem to be driving out for the day.”

    Where the fluke fishing has been red hot is off the docks and small boats fishing in Montauk Harbor, from the inlet jetties, and along Gin Beach. Or, if you want to bring the kids to see fluke up close, the West Lake Marina has an open-air tank with fluke, sea robins, a sand shark (dogfish), a few scallops, and 10 small mackerel. There were 11, but one of the fluke sucked one down.

    West Lake Marina has a Facebook page with photos and short reports about weekly fishing exploits. There’s a good shot of Carl Safina of Amagansett (his new book, “The View from Lazy Point” is great) and a friend, Randy Kevkin, with a 37-pound striped bass they found on Saturday. Chris Miller said the Facebook page was getting hits in the hundreds and was working to keep anglers from away up to date on what’s happening here.

    This week that includes continued productive shark fishing with a thresher weighing over 400 pounds brought back to the Star Island Yacht Club, no appreciable sign of tuna, and stripers being caught on clam baits along Napeague and Amagansett beaches. Assuming the wind lets up, a small boat venture in Gardiner’s Bay will be rewarded with productive fluke and porgy fishing.

    The big news for small kids is that baby bluefish, a k a snappers, have made a strong, early appearance in Three Mile Harbor. Parents are reminded that state law allows anglers 15 bluefish per day, no more than 10 of which may be shorter than 12 inches.

    Speaking of kids, the Sea Tow company that is often referred to as the AAA of the sea, has launched a program to encourage boaters to get their kids into life vests. The Coast Guard requires that all boaters under the age of 13 wear them. To help promote safety, Sea Tow has initiated a loaner program. Life jackets of various sizes are available to try on and use at the launching ramp at Gann Road on Three Mile Harbor, at Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk, and at the Montauk Marine Basin.

   It’s a mixed up world, that’s for sure. There are some who have the point of view that world ethnic groups, world languages, world religions, and world nations shouldn’t be mixed up and homogenized in the same melting pot. Others say it’s inevitable, why fight it? The human being is one of the few species that is racing toward one cosmopolitan worldwide identity.

    Such happened in a few highly mobile species long ago. The osprey looks the same whether observed in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, South America, or North America. Hundreds of plant species have been distributed throughout each of the same six continents by hook or by crook. A few made it on their own, most had the help of humans. If a plant or animal species is in its place of origin, the plant or animal is considered native; elsewhere it is most likely “introduced.” Plants such as the dandelion from Eurasia are most often known as weeds elsewhere. In America there is a huge industry combining manufacturing and application services to root them out of lawns and gardens.

    Plant and insect species are breaking down the distinctions between one country’s flora and fauna and those of another much faster than humans immigrate and emigrate. There is a big difference, however, between the two types of blending. Plant species mostly breed with their own. Insects always breed with their own. Thus their genetic lines, except for mutations here and there, hold relatively steady.

    It’s folly to try to stop it. The European royalty thought they had it all figured out. They’d preserve the very highest couture by the application of selective breeding. It worked well for thoroughbred horses and pedigreed dogs, why not for kings and queens, dukes and earls, and the rest of them? Such selective breeding applied to royalty produced many good and wise leaders, but just as many miscreants.

    Whether one believes in a divine presence or personage, evolution and natural selection, or both, or some other all-encompassing theory, the simple fact is that there are many, many more entities in this world that are different than ones that are the same. New species are discovered every day, especially among the smaller organisms. Many of the new forms, such as in viruses and bacteria, are called strains. They differ from the parent species in one or two aspects, but are otherwise quite similar.

    Over many millenniums new species beget newer species. It has been such since the dawn of creation. Scientists are quite certain that the number of distinct forms of plants, animals, protists, and suborganisms extant throughout the world today is only a fraction of the billions that existed previously. No matter how much inbreeding there is, differences keep multiplying. In other words, the more things stay the same the more they actually change.

    You can change the composition, say, the texture, of the local flora and fauna by swamping them with imports. That is exactly what has happened in the Hawaiian Islands. But, the door’s been open so long now that there’s much too much to cull. We applaud when bald eagles come back to Long Island to nest after a 75-year absence. And most of us enjoy the wild turkeys, which didn’t come back on their own but were reintroduced.

    We don’t mind so much the invasion from the south occurring throughout the last half century that resulted in a host of now familiar birds such as the cardinal, mockingbird, titmouse, red-bellied woodpecker, blue-gray gnatcatcher, summer tanager, Carolina wren, boat-tailed grackle, oystercatcher, willet, turkey vulture, Chuck-Will’s-Widow, and fish crow.

    And just lately, blue grosbeaks and fork-tailed flycatchers have been dodging the immigration officers. They’re sure to start enclaves here, as well, in the next 10 or 20 years. Uh oh, but what about the armada of Portuguese man-of-war en route, and didn’t someone just photograph a coyote in Water Mill?

    Yes, there is a downside to all of this variety and flux of organisms coming and going. For every new colorful bird, dragonfly, ridley turtle, or cloudless sulphur butterfly to come our way, there is sure to be a lone star tick, chigger, brown recluse spider, or Asian tiger mosquito to match it.

    First, the birds in the trees greeted the sun with song and chatter. A woodpecker hammered away on an old catalpa tree pregnant with its orchid-like blossoms. Then came the low drone of boats leaving Montauk Harbor.

    It was 6 a.m. on the dot, the start time, the appointed hour of departure for the second day of the Star Island Yacht Club’s first shark tournament of the season, a type of derby that Capt. Frank Mundus, Montauk’s Monster Man and Peter Benchley’s model for Quint, the irascible charter captain in “Jaws,” declared vestigial years before he died back in ’08. 

    It will be interesting to see if the no-kill Shark’s Eye tournament scheduled for July 27 and 28 from the Montauk Marine Basin will generate excitement enough — with its global positioning shark tags that allow us to follow the caught-and-released sharks on their travels via satellite — to replace the big-money, cirque du sang. Not likely. In addition to the spectacle of sharks being hoisted to the scales last weekend, there was the $322,400 cash pool that fishermen were angling for a piece of. But, hey, you never know. A 218-pound blue shark caught aboard the My Joyce II earned $90,400 for the crew.

    Lawrence Byrne in the Pilar (the name of Ernest Hemingway’s legendary fishing boat) was philosophical about bringing what would have been the winning mako shark to the scales 15 minutes too late to qualify. The 369-pounder, the largest shark caught in any of the blue shark, mako, and thresher categories, was hooked 20 miles south of Montauk Point.

    As it turned out, Capt. Chuck Mallinson’s Joy Sea boat took first place in the mako division with a 311-pound fish. The 346-pound thresher taken by Jason Blake’s Blue Eyes was the heaviest among the threshers weighed.

    In the hard-fought Montauk SurfMasters spring tournament for striped bass, Mike Larson caught a 32.94-pound striper on Saturday morning to knock off Geoff Bowen’s third-place 20.7-pound­er. Ben McCarron remains in first place with the 44.74-pound bass caught on June 8. Jason Pecoraro’s 40.2-pounder is in second place, and Mike Larson’s fish is now in third. Brendon Farrell remains alone on the leader board in the youth division.

    Of course some people fish Huck Finn style, just to get lost in the dreams that appear between angler and a body of water on a spring day.

    Speaking of which, Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports so many two-foot long striped bass in Gardiner’s Bay off the north side of Napeague that “it looks like the bottom is moving.” He said the porgy fishing around Gardiner’s Island was “crazy, really, really big porgies,” and suggested wetting the line down tide from the party boat that’s been visiting the area of late. “It’s a good place to fish. There’s so much bait in the water like a giant chum slick.”

    On to sailing. Last season, Pat Mun­dus, a Montauker who now hails from Greenport, founded East End Charters, a group that puts people and sailboats together for outings of just about any kind. The first paragraph of her press release says it all: “Pat Mundus, a professional mariner in her own right (a retired ship’s officer) is the daughter of Montauk’s famous shark fisherman. Yet unlike her flamboyant father, Pat instead fishes for people looking to enjoy themselves on yachts — for a few hours or a few days.”

    She also suggests her service as a pleasant alternative to the ill-fated Hampton Jitney ferry that connected North and South Forks last year. Mundus can be reached at 477-6993, or at [email protected].

    Some of you might have tuned in last week when this reporter told of how he had to swim like Johnny Weissmuller after his Bristol sloop Leilani when her mooring chain parted from its anchor. Happy to report that Leilani rides easily on her new mooring and only awaits a new fiddle block for her mainsail sheet to set sail. 

    Leilani has an old rigid-hull inflatable dinghy for a tender. Jacob Bacon at Uihlein’s Marina in Montauk took a look at it the other day and suggested using Krylon spray paint for plastic surfaces as a way to protect the rubber from the sun. A good tip.