Outdoors

Fall marches on! At 6:30 last Thursday evening on a trip to Southampton Village by way of Deerfield and Edge of Woods Roads, both lanes were clear and only a single leaf fell. Three hours later on the return trip the roads were half leaf-covered while three dozen leaves floated down. Fall had begun in earnest.

On Oct. 23, I joined a group of friends for a full day of fishing on the Oh Brother!, a charter boat out of Montauk whose captain, Rob Aaronson, and his first mate, Rudi Bonicelli, are seasoned pros who know the inshore and offshore waters around Montauk as well as anyone.

The post-noon photoperiod will lose an hour on Sunday, while the winter solstice is only 50 days away. Any day now the lawn will be coated with gray upon waking, and frosts will soon become an everyday phenomenon.

The ruby-crowned kinglet is as small as my nose

Everyone who fishes has his or her share of fish stories. Some are impossible to believe, while some are clearly embellished and need to be taken with a grain of salt, along with a wry smile of doubt. But some are actually the honest truth, no matter how far-fetched they may sound.

Bob Dylan did not write “the answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,” here on the East End — it was probably in a brownstone apartment in Greenwich Village — but if the Nobel laureate has been in these environs over the past 10 days or so, he most certainly would have been inspired to pen that familiar refrain, as the gusty winds have been unrelenting of late, thwarting many a planned fishing trip.

On Friday morning I had to make a trip to Riverhead and the Department of Motor Vehicles to get a new driver’s license. Not only was it set to expire shortly, but the picture of me on the front was at least 25 years old.

There is a raging battle going on throughout Long Island’s two non-city counties, Nassau and Suffolk. It splits the inhabitants into two camps, environmentalists and pro-developers.

It’s been almost two months since I last filled my boat up with diesel fuel. I hold about 85 gallons in each of two tanks below deck, and given the high price of fuel this year, I’ve consciously slowed down my cruising speed when heading out for a day of fishing or lobstering.

September is not only back-to-school month, it is also the end-of-harvest month and fish-after-fish month. It is the time of the great migration: birds, fish, whales, and even butterflies and darning needles are winging it south.

It’s not a national holiday, but Tumbleweed Tuesday, the day after Labor Day, passed by us a few weeks ago.

Every resident of Southampton Town knows about the notorious sandpit with the euphonious name Sand Land situated at the end of Middle Line Highway next to Golf at the Bridge in Noyac.

t was the wise Greek Archimedes who in 250 B.C. formulated the principle of buoyancy and that a chunk of something that drops into the sea and floats displaces its own mass. If it sinks below the surface, it displaces its own volume. When a glacier slides off a mountain face into the ocean, it displaces its own mass, and the sea rises proportionately. As it slowly melts away and becomes one with the sea, the sea rises a bit more.

It was bound to happen. Overwarm water temperatures this summer, backed by the unpredictability of Mother Nature and other factors, has resulted in an outbreak of a nitrogen-fueled rust tide in a number of locales, including parts of Three Mile Harbor, Noyac Bay, and Little Peconic Bay. The bloom has also been widely seen in other waterways on both the North and South Shores of Long Island in recent weeks.

Nature has many survival tricks up its sleeve when it comes to the possibility of being eaten. `We all know how the monarch butterfly is able to escape predation and fly 100 miles or more in a day during its annual migration without suffering a single molestation.

Summer is not over yet. In fact, the next few weeks may be among the best of the year for getting out on the water in small paddle craft like canoes, kayaks, and stand-up paddleboards. But storms and high winds can quickly turn a fun excursion into a dangerous situation, separating paddlers from their craft.

When boating or sailing, there are times as the season moves along that doing the same thing over and over becomes downright boring. The same is true for the pursuit of fish. I simply get burned out when chasing the same species day after day.

The recent to-do about Cartwright Island raises some interesting questions. We are sometimes prone to think of the present as the past, East Hampton today has always been, Southampton has always been, Lake Montauk has always been the way it is, etc., etc., etc. But in fact things, including our local landmasses and their surrounding waters, are fluxing every minute, during the day when we can see the change and at night when most of us are sleeping. So it is with the contours of the South Fork’s north and south coastlines.

Hands down, dawn is my favorite part of the day. No matter the season, I love to get up early and take it all in.

On Saturday the rains came, but it didn’t spoil the first ever release of bobwhites in the hamlet of Montauk by the Third House Nature Center group. Juvenile bobwhite after bobwhite fluttered off into the green tapestry of Montauk County Park atop the hills east of Lake Montauk. Such release of this quail species, native to most of the United States, but not common anywhere, could be the beginning of the comeback of it not only in Montauk, but in the rest of East Hampton Town as well. Two more release days are planned by fall in this five-year program.

Sharks are hot. As in the past few summers, shark sightings seem to be capturing a lot of headlines and attention of late. Ever since Steven Spielberg put the toothy fish on the silver screen several decades ago, the mystique and fascination continues to grow.

Last week’s unusually turbulent summer weather, which included extended wind gusts to over 30 miles per hour on several days mixed in with a few tropical downpours, certainly stirred up our local waters. Rip current warnings were posted up and down the coast for most of the week and weekend. It was best to stay out of the drink most days.

This column is about a failed plan to construct a failed recharge basin. It is another Humpty Dumpty story about engineers, town councils, town attorneys, contractors, and the like designing and trying to build a recharge basin to trap runoff water from a farm field in East Hampton on a site along Route 114 in 2010.

For those who have followed my adventures in trapping lobsters over the past few months, I must freely admit that I have an even greater fondness (and appetite) for a rather close cousin of that popular staple of the summertime clam bake.

On Monday afternoon I went down to the ocean beach and walked between Bridgehampton and Sagaponack. There was the usual bunch of beachgoers enjoying the sun, but what I was there for was to examine the wrack line left by recent high tides and storms, such as the tropical cyclone Chris that brushed our shore last weekend.

After one of the hottest, muggiest Fourths of July on record, we wondered what nature would serve up next. There was no relief the day after.

Terry Sullivan called last week from Sag Harbor to tell me that the prickly pear cactus was in bloom along Long Beach Road’s south side. He also mentioned that PSEG has been putting up new utility poles. I’m a stone’s throw away, so I motored over and took a look. Indeed, at least 10 new poles had been erected, each with strange-colored horizontal members on top to which the electrical transmission wires were fastened.

Back in March, I set out my lobster traps for the first time in about nine years. With various work commitments behind me, I finally had enough free time to exhume my gear from its extended deep sleep on dry land.

Last week, other than taking my boat out at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday to for a quick check on my lobster traps (yes, I did capture enough for a dinner or two), I did not pick up a fishing rod. The reason was pretty simple, as I was hanging around the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills.

A few weeks ago, I penned a story about two different types of boaters. The premise was that you either preferred to cruise under power or chose the quietness that a sailboat provides. With a few exceptions, it’s pretty black and white on this matter.