Don’t Rush Off Now

There’s something sad in September’s light, in her sunsets, in her wind that blows a passionate, late-summer kiss, or whispers her warm goodbye, hasta luego, or, as I’ve heard it said in Kentucky, “Now don’t rush off.”

I’m referring to September in the feminine. That’s because I’ve been thinking about what Mike Martinsen said during the Concerned Citizens of Montauk event at the Coast restaurant in Montauk on Saturday. It was a seafood seminar built around an introduction to Paul Greenberg and his new book, “American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood.”

Greenberg was joined by Nat Miller, a 13th-generation bayman and East Hampton Town trustee, Bonnie Brady, executive director of the Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, Sean Barrett, founder of Dock to Dish, a community supported fisheries company, John (Barley) Dunn, director of the town shellfish hatchery on Fort Pond Bay,  Martinsen and his partner, Mike Doall of the Montauk Shellfish Company oyster farm in Lake Montauk, and Carl Safina, an author and founder of the Safina Center at Stony Brook University, formerly the Blue Ocean Institute.

It was a lively, informative afternoon, each speaker stressing the need to improve marine habitat, and addressing the contradiction stated by Greenberg: “But in spite of our billions of acres of ocean, our 94,000 miles of coast, our 3.5 million miles of rivers, a full 91 percent of the seafood Americans eat comes from abroad” — is imported — “and a third of the seafood Americans catch gets sold to foreigners.”

Summing up his remarks about human population density and its negative effect on once-productive waters, Martinsen said, “The planet is not our planet. I envision her as our mother, the mother of all life.”

So, it was with those words rolling around in my head, that I set sail Saturday afternoon on one of Leilani’s last voyages of the season in a decidedly distaff September wind, and in the company of an equally feminine first mate, Kyle.

Ten knots of wind blew a little west of south, perfect for a course to Gardiner’s Island. We were perhaps a half mile northwest of the Montauk Harbor inlet when Kyle shouted, “What’s that splashing?” She was looking behind us, where every few seconds white water erupted from the surface 300 yards away. I put Leilani about to investigate and it was not long before we were surrounded by a school of perhaps 20 feeding dolphins. Dolphin sightings, near shore, have been numerous, no doubt because Montauk has set a bountiful table for them this season.

Squid, porgies, bluefish, striped bass, bunker, sea robins, alewives — who knows what they were chasing on Saturday afternoon, but their slow grazing was punctuated by leaps and rushes that told us whatever their prey was, it did not want to be eaten.

Sailboats are good for dolphin watching, less invasive of their space. We could hear them moving through the water, a peaceful sound. We tacked, and tacked again, to match their movements with Kyle sitting forward speaking to them in a dialect of dolphin that otherwise would have been drowned by an engine. We parted ways, they heading toward Rhode Island, we toward Gardiner’s Island and the setting sun.

Could they have been chasing false albacore? There are enough of them around. Fly casters, and anglers lobbing light spin tackle have been having great success, especially given the stretch of fine weather. The weather has given offshore fishermen opportunities to find the albacores’ larger cousins as well as yellowfin and bigeye tuna.

Surfcasters continue to wait for the fall run of striped bass to begin in earnest. Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk reported small stripers being caught under the Montauk Lighthouse during the week. As of Tuesday, no bass have been weighed in the Montauk SurfMasters competition that got under way last week.

If the dolphins have been fattening up on bluefish, they could have found them aplenty off Sammy’s Beach just west of the Three Mile Harbor inlet in recent days. Blues in the 10 to 12-pound range have kept surfcasters reeling.

Steve (Perv) Kramer reported striped bass in the surf at Surfside in Montauk last week. Harvey Bennett, owner of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett, said there was a rumor of a 57-pound striper caught at night by a surfcaster in one of Montauk’s moorland coves last Thursday or Friday, but this could not be confirmed.

Bennett said that fluke seemed to have moved out of Gardiner’s Bay, although “the falsies are going nuts in the bay, and the porgies are as big as rowboats.”