By Captain Ralph Wilkins
The Coastal Angler show tour is well underway and readers and fans have been amazing! While it can be exhausting, it can also be very rewarding talking about fishing—especially with our younger generation of anglers, who seem to be amazed at the tuna we catch on Wicked Tuna. Meanwhile, winter rages on and summer can’t get here fast enough for most of us.
Here are some thoughts on how the extremely cold weather can affect us this upcoming season. Some say cold winters bring fruitful summers. Personally, I am more concerned with the snow melting off and torrential rains that may occur this spring. Most of us that go tuna fishing in New England remember the past few summers on Stellwagen and other popular fishing ledges along the coast having small adolescent tunas in abundance. Some days while giant fishing on the Odysea, it was not uncommon to catch and release a half-dozen small ones. Yet, in the summer of 2013, Stellwagen Bank and Jeffreys Ledge were dry. Although some small fish were taken with the whales down off Nauset Inlet and Chatham visiting spots such as Crab Ledge, overall spots like Stellwagen Bank and Jeffreys Ledge were dry on both keeper and adolescent tuna. It was a very lean year for Bluefin tuna in 2013 and most captains have the same report.
Personally, I believe it had a lot to do with the winter we experienced last year and the two months of about 10 inches of rain in the spring. Eventually, all the fresh water from snow melt and almost 20 inches of rain in two months combined with a watershed of over hundreds, maybe thousands, of square miles of inland areas will flow down the rivers and then into the sea. That’s a hell of a lot of fresh water with silt, sand, gravel and whatever else is being dumped into our coastal waters. Think of it as a nonsmoker, who walks into a room full of smokers and their smoke—not pleasant to breathe. Bluefin swim thousands of miles through pristine oceans and then hit the coast of cloudy seawater diluted with silty, muddy freshwater. I can only imagine that they don’t like it. I know from years of black fishing in New York that as soon as the Hudson River’s ice started to defrost upstream, fishing in the New York Bright would come to a quick end due to the influx of massive amounts of fresh water.
What keeps me optimistic is reports from Kevin on the Huntress and Hollywood on the Ms. Lilly, two guys I know from the Bluefin harpoon fleet. Last summer offshore east of Stellwagen, the planes had spotted some of the biggest schools of Bluefin seen in recent years. Our neighbors in Canada had a good season once again, so the good news is they have no all gone just yet!
Ralph Wilkins is a contributing editor for Coastal Angler Magazine. Wilkins is the captain of the Odysea and popular cast member of National Geographic Channel’s hit television show Wicked Tuna. Email Captain Ralph at ralphjwilkins@gmail.com, visit his website at odyseatuna.com and be sure to like “Captain Ralph Wilkins” on Facebook.
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