I ended up catching a legal sized flounder today. I won't divulge how, but my efforts to raise one on clams around hooks failed. The water is warming significantly now and the crabs are showing up in large numbers. I would expect the fish to begin shortly. Maybe even tomorrow when the wind goes SSW. We'll see.

I'll start bringing the camera out with me. I've been leaving it in the truck.

Too early, too soon.

I went fishing this week. But I didn’t catch anything. I tried for flounder, first on a very windy afternoon. It was sunny and warm, but I was kind of an idiot for even trying. The decision to creep around the point at Saquish was less than smart. It was stupid. I took on some water and ended up turning around and hiding behind Clark’s Island. The wind was west at 25 to 30. Fishing outside was not going to happen. So I called a friend who I thought could guide me a bit through this early season stuff. He told me where to go and this I did, but it produced nothing. It was fun, however. I thoroughly enjoyed baiting my flounder rig and fishing along some of the most picturesque spots in New England – alone.

The next day I ran outside the bay into deeper water. I was sure that something, even a sea robin, would take my bait. But nothing happened. I needed to get back to work so I left and felt somewhat frustrated. But as I rounded Saquish rip I realized that it is still early and that in a couple of weeks it should be a different story. Stay tuned.

The only silver lining is that I caught a 12” tom cod in my crab trap on the oyster grant. I grabbed the slippery bugger – we looked at each other. After a few seconds I concluded that he was more concerned about this situation than I was about mine. But then I put the beautiful fish into the water and watched as it swam back into the depths. The crabs, plentiful, remained in the trap, until the next time.

Anyone interested in green crabs?

ZNZ 2

ZNZ 1

One way to get over the hump of winter is to cheat and make a 30-hour trip to Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania. Here are a few photos until the journal entries begin.

Over the Hump?

February 8, 2010

I’ve been busy and it’s been cold, so time and mental energy have been rare commodities. But tonight I’ll provide a summary of how life on the water has been to me over the past few weeks:

Ice was something we all anticipated this winter, but this time it was weird ice. Sometimes, when it really freezes over, it thickens a few inches over the oyster farms and we wait a day or two for it to melt or get busted up by the fronts that routinely introduce new series of NW breezes; sometimes these even switch around, briefly, to the S or NE before reconstructing the NW gusts.

We’ve seen this pattern this winter, but something was a bit different on the east side of the bay where I work. Ice formed and we worked through it, but at the same time more ice was forming behind the Power Point Bridge, and this stuff built up, and built up into very thick slabs of waxy sea ice. This ice gets thick by being trapped by the bridge, building layers, and picking up marsh mud (and marsh), and it continues to build under the right conditions. And the right conditions prevailed for most of January. On the big tides (the moon tides, drainers, or spring tides) there is finally enough volumetric inertia to force this thick ice through the bridge supports, kind of like slicing slabs of cheese. These slabs move quite suddenly southward through the pilings on drainer ebbs like missiles in slow motion. As the tide drops these ice floes scrape the bottom and, upon the low, they eventually settle on the flats until the tide changes. These big chunks can measure up to 25 feet long and 4 feet thick and they often bring loads of marsh mud and clumps of weed along for the ride.

This is fun stuff for an oyster farmer. You know, finding truck-sized chunks of ice on the oysters. Well, we’ll see what happens.

So, in sum, January was kind of tough: it was perpetually cold but not cold enough to solidify the bay. The weather pattern seemed stuck on the same song each week. But then in early February things began to change a little. We had a warm week that straddled the transition from January, then cold, and now (finally) the higher angle of the sun is beginning to warm each day above freezing more consistently. And with this change I am seeing a response in the water. Crabs are waking up. So are the fish – some flounders are nosing about the oysters in search of mates and perhaps the blood worms that are now increasing in activity in the mud below.

I look forward to the longer, warmer days ahead.

Please visit Dave Grossman's version of the ice and related topics:

http://blog.davidgrossmanphotography.com/2010/1/ice-floes.html

Winter Scenes

It's been cold for several weeks. The water temperature in the bay is pretty much on the ice line which means that a day or two of subfreezing weather can result in rapid ice formation. But we keep working.