Fluke really jumping on LI Sound

It was one of those sights you have to see to believe. The waters of eastern Long Island Sound on Wednesday evening were churning with fish tight against the shore. Most were small blues carving up vast schools of sand eels swept ever eastward with the receding tide. But between the choppers, an hour before dark, dozens of fluke could be seen leaping completely clear of the water.

It's a phenomenon I've witnessed occasionally, but never with such intensity. As the blues herded the panicked minnows tight to the beach time and again, the flatfish slipped quietly underneath and then launched upward through the dense schools. Jigging the lip where small waves broke just yards from the shore, I quickly caught and released nearly 20 summer flatties, plus several blues. So intense was the evening bite that, after losing my last curly tailed grub to a chopper's toothy maw, I continued to catch both fluke and blues on a bare jig head.

"I'm not surprised the fluke were so thick along the beach,'' captain Bob Ceglowski of the Captain Bob fleet in Mattituck said later that night. "They are stacked in 30-foot depths right outside our inlet. The big difference is we've had plenty of keepers with the shorts. It's a spectacular run under way right now. We've had two 9-pounders already this week, and tallied 50 keepers to 8 pounds on Wednesday's trip.''

As the sand eels have flooded other sections of Long Island Sound, the fast action has followed. Shorts and an occasional 4-pounder now pave the bottom at Sand City in Northport Bay, and a steady pick of keepers has developed in the open Sound off the LIPA stacks. Smithtown Bay and the Buoy 11 area off Eaton's Neck also have produced legal fluke, while blitz action with smaller fish can be had inside Port Jefferson Harbor.

All of this is not to say that South Shore fluking has been lacking. Indeed, there are plenty of shorts inside the bays bending rods and raising smiles. Out in the ocean, 50-foot depths have produced keepers at Montauk, and off Shinnecock, Moriches, Fire Island and Jones Inlets. Anglers fishing aboard the Greenport open boat Peconic Star also have headed home with solid stacks of fillets in recent days.

Plenty of stripers

If stripers are your game, Orient Point, Montauk, Debs Inlet and western Long Island Sound are the current hot spots. Captain Steven Laura Fallon of the Manhasset charter boat Swedish Princess termed the striper action "red hot on bunker chunks'' inside the western Sound harbors, while Captain Nick Sevene of No Time Charters in Oceanside said that live bunker produced several 30-pound bass for his fares this week along the South Shore. The striper action had been spreading east toward Fire Island Inlet, but big blues have now zeroed in on the bunker in that zone, making it tougher to single out the linesiders.

On the bottom scene, porgy and sea bass action is off to a solid start out of Point Lookout and Freeport.

"We've had plenty of keepers, plus some stripers, in 40- to 70-foot depths," said Steve Karney of the Point Lookout open boat Super Hawk. "It's been a lot of fun. The sea bass, especially, have turned on just in time for Father's Day.''

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