Sluggish soggy start stalls saltwater season

Although, as expected, April Showers brought May flowers this year, they also heralded an unprecedented period of May monsoons this time around. Our steady spring diet of downpours, torrential rains, hail, flooding, and thunderstorms has essentially shut down most of our outdoor activities, especially for those of us itchin’ to get the saltwater fishing season started.

After all, the Maryland and Delaware flounder seasons are now open. Both states have a 16 ½inch minimum size (down from 17 inches last year) and a daily limit of 4 fluke. New Jersey fluke anglers will have to wait until May 25 for the season opener which runs through Sept. 22, two weeks longer than last year’s version which closed on Sept. 5. For Jerseyites, the daily bag limit and size limit is the same as last year: three fish at 18 inches. In the Delaware Bay, Jersey anglers will observe a 17-inch minimum size with a three fish daily limit west of COLREGS.

In any case, the weather has been so inhospitable to boaters and anglers this spring, I delayed the seasonal launch of my craft, Open Debate, for almost a month. Traditionally I’m already probing the back bays of Ocean City, Maryland, drifting for flounder by mid April. This year Open Debate didn’t get a sniff of the brine until her inaugural launch on May 10. I managed to squeeze in a few hours of fishing on Friday and Saturday before the next nasty storm front moved in.

But the unseasonably cool bay temperatures and murky water quality did not help my cause as I registered a solid zero on the old fish meter. My efforts floundered as the fluke refused to cooperate. Surrounded by a few dozen other weekend boaters also in search of a few flatfish fillets, I didn’t glimpse a single flounder, either legal or throwback, reeled up by any angler. A few fishermen hooked up with skates (a sign that the waters were still a bit chilly for a decent flounder bite) but that was the sum total of the angling action I witnessed.

Once the weather breaks, old salts looking for angling targets other than flounder should find decent action on schools of bluefish that are now starting to show up in good numbers up and down the coast. In the Delaware Bay the black drum bite has begun in earnest with a few striped bass mixed in but weakfish remain scarce. Maryland’s storied rockfish (i.e. striped bass) season in the Chesapeake is also heating up. Through the end of the month of May, Chesapeake anglers may keep two rockfish per person per day between 19-28 inches or one fish between 19-28 inches and one fish over 28 inches. Striped bass action is heating up on the Chesapeake Bay. This bruiser was boated in late April last year.

The black sea bass season in Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey opened back on May 15. A party boat favorite, sea bass keepers must be a minimum of 12.5 inches in all three of those states with a daily limit of 15 fish in Delaware and Maryland and a 10 fish limit in New Jersey (until July 1 when the Jersey limit drops down to two).

Meanwhile, while I was still fishing Ocean City’s Isle of Wight Bay, the DNR’s marine police putted by. I asked the officer how many flounder he had seen caught that day. “Just one,” he frowned, not indicating if it was a keeper or throwback. Nonetheless, I knew that in the past weeks some anglers had managed to boat a few legal fluke. In fact, the cover of the Coastal Fisherman newspaper here featured a host of lucky anglers hoisting half a dozen keeper flounder up to 23 inches in length, all caught in the Thorofare, exactly the same fishing grounds I’d been drifting.

Coastal Fisherman also reported that the first flounder of the year was caught back on April 14. Although there must still be some fluke around, the only “action” I experienced over those two days was essentially dead weight as I cranked up three horseshoe crabs, one single, and one romantically entangled couple.

I’d like to return to the back bays later this week and maybe actually catch a fish. You probably would too. So here’s hoping our ugly weather pattern, relentless rains, and subpar fishing conditions finally take a turn for the better.

HORSESHOE CRAB INVASION IMMINENT

My close encounters with those horseshoe crabs are indicative of many more such hookups to come. In the coming weeks Delaware Bay and much of our mid-Atlantic coastline can expect to be inundated with spawning horseshoe crabs. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) tells us that massive numbers of these “living fossils” come out of the depths of the Atlantic Ocean in May and June to lay their eggs on shore. The greatest number of horseshoe crabs can be found on Maryland and Delaware beaches during the full moon, May 29 and June 28, and new moon, June 13 and July 12. It’s a spawning migration that dates back some 350 million years.

“The horseshoe crab is such a unique species here in Maryland,” said MDNR biologist Steve Doctor, who conducts an annual horseshoe crab survey. “During peak egg-laying times, the horseshoe crabs are so abundant you can’t even see the sand.”

One individual horseshoe crab can lay nearly 20,000 eggs but many do not survive. Crustaceans, fish, and migrating shorebirds, including the red knot, prey on the eggs for food. Adult horseshoe crabs are also vulnerable to predators if they get stuck on their backs.

To help ensure the survival of the species, anyone who spots a horseshoe crab flipped on its back is asked to gently flip the crab over so it can return to the water. The best practice for flipping over a horseshoe crab is to pick up the animal by its sides using two hands; never by its telson (tail).

While horseshoe crabs may look menacing, they are actually harmless and very gentle creatures; they do not bite or strike. And despite their name, they’re not crustaceans, but are in a separate sub-phylum of arthropods. They are generally not fished for consumption, but have long been used as bait, and in recent years, have proven invaluable to cutting-edge biomedical research due to unique, copper-based blue blood.