Vineyard commercial and recreational fishermen are invited to attend a meeting to discuss a plan to organize as a group; the meeting will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 18 at 5 p.m. at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven.
Fishing boats are back out in Vineyard Sound, after what has been a long stretch of really bad weather, not just on the land, on the water.
The Menemsha fleet returned to fishing for fluke on Wednesday, after being kept shoreside since last weekend because of the wind.
“I haven’t fished for three days,” said Capt. Craig Coutinho of the Menemsha dragger Viking on Tuesday night. “The fluke fishing was going pretty good, before we got this.”
The summer flounder, also called fluke, season is about to come to an end. The state will close the commercial season on Tuesday, August 11. The recreational season will close three days later.
Commercial fishermen cannot land any more fluke after 8 p.m. Tuesday. As of the end of last week, 85 per cent of the quota was taken in two months of fishing. The season opened on June 10 and the fishermen have had little trouble getting their 300-pound daily trip limit.
Martha’s Vineyard leads the Cape and Islands in bay scallop landings, beating Nantucket. The Vineyard’s commercial and recreational shellfishermen landed over 12,000 bushels this past season, and more are being landed. With three weeks still left in the season, Nantucket shellfishermen have landed 8,000 bushels. This makes the Vineyard the largest producer of wild bay scallops in the world.
In 1978 all the fish I cared about died. They were the biggest largemouth bass I had ever seen, and they lived in a pond ten minutes’ walk from my house on a large estate in the backwoods of Greenwich, Connecticut, perhaps the most famously wealthy town in America. We did not own the house, the estate, the pond, or the largemouth bass, but I still thought of the fish as my fish. I had found them, and the pond was my rightful hunting ground.
It should be bonito season. The water is warm, well into the 70s. There are plenty of sand eels swimming near the shoreline and there are plenty of terns overhead feeding. The bonito should be here. But they mostly aren’t.
Blue crab is a Vineyard seafood delicacy. For many years, the idea of eating blue crab here was kept quiet among those who knew where to find them. They were the Vineyard’s secret seafood.
But increasing awareness of the health of the Island’s great ponds has moved the topic above a whisper; the only secret now is where.
The commercial striped bass season ended last Monday and Alec Gale of West Tisbury said it was the worst season he has seen in the six years he has been hauling fish to the mainland for the local anglers. “It was a slow season, and it wasn’t because of overfishing,” Mr. Gale said. “I think it was a lack of bait and the warm water temperature.”
FOUR FISH: The Future of the Last Wild Food. By Paul Greenberg. Penguin Press, New York, N.Y. July 2010. 304 pages. $25.95, hardcover.
The title is too narrow. Don’t think for a moment this is a book only about salmon, cod, bass and tuna. The book goes beyond the history and plight of four fish, to our hunger for fresh fish of all kinds. For anyone who wonders where the swordfish went, how we emerged from the collapse of the whale fishery, or simply which fish is safe to order at the restaurant, Four Fish offers much.
Striped bass and fluke are a prime item this weekend in fish markets and in restaurants. And that will be it for the season. Due to the fact that state quotas have been met, the commercial striped bass season will close on Monday, August 23, and the commercial fluke season will close on Wednesday, August 25. The state estimates the 1.12 million-pound quota for striped bass and 846,667-pound quota for fluke have been met. Fish markets will likely have fish for a few days after the fishery closes.
