[dropcap]S[/dropcap]eptember is a sketchy month for fishing around Long Island, but you may get lucky and find a stray yellowfin or wahoo just offshore. Sometimes you get lucky and find a school of average 40- to 60-pound yellowfins out in the middle of the channel between Long Island and Crooked Island, but chances are you are better off saving gas and bait, and just go downrigger trolling for smoker kings or deep dropping.
We have been most successful deep dropping for escolar in September during the day time. Pretty much identical daytime swordfish rigs with electric reels but only successful using whole fish and not squid. There are so many other squids down there that cannibalize your bait before you even realize it. We target depths between 1800 feet and 2500 feet where we can find a good rocky ledge that holds a lot of squid. Tricky to tell when you have a fish on as they seem to not fight much at all until they get in your boat and have a tenancy to go all mahi mahi on you. A good amount of blackfin tunas still hang around and can be fun to get the vertical jigs in them. The bottom fishing is good in the sound for grouper and mutton snapper.
Drift along between 120- to 180-feet of water and drop live pilchards or split tail ballyhoo down to the bottom and wait a few seconds before the action starts. Bring lots of hooks with you, as the sharks will be cutting you off on every other drop. For those venturing far offshore, watch that weather window carefully, it may start off as a flat calm day, but September likes to brew up some storms that blow 50 miles-per-hour out of nowhere. Good luck and tight lines.