New-moon springs load the North Fork rocks as bay heat pushes fluke to the inlets

We had a week of southwest breeze lay on us like a wet blanket, day after day, and it did what southwest wind always does along this shore — it warmed the surface skin and greased up the water a shade. Nothing dirty enough to shut things down, but enough that the stripers pulled off the open beach and tucked into the rock piles and reef structure where there's still some cool water holding underneath. The moon's been sliding down toward new, and that matters more than most folks give it credit for. We're heading into new-moon springs this week — bigger swings, stronger current, and a tide that pushes more water through places like Plum Gut and around Rocky Point than we've seen since before the last full moon.

Here's the part I've been waiting on. The flood tide's high stand is lining up with sunset again for the first time since June's full moon — that window runs hardest Friday through Monday, the 10th through the 13th. When the top of the flood hits right at last light, bait gets pushed up onto the structure just as the low sun takes the glare off the water, and bass that have been sulking deep all day come up to feed in that last hour. I've fished this shore sixty years and that alignment, dusk and high water together, is about as close to a sure thing as this business offers. Doesn't mean you'll limit out, but it means you should be standing on a rock with a line in the water at that hour, not still eating dinner.

Bass fishing itself has been honest work this week, not easy work. I've had guys tell me two keepers in four hours off Horton Point, others get skunked entirely working the same stretch an hour later. The ones connecting are working bucktails — three-quarter ounce white or chartreuse — bounced slow along the boulder fields off Horton Point and Rocky Point on the last two hours of the incoming, right where the current wraps the rock and slows just enough for a bass to sit and wait. Eel-skin plugs and rigged eels swum slow through the same wash after dark have taken a few better fish, high twenties to low thirties, nothing to write home about but real striped bass on real tackle. The smaller schoolies are scattered along the whole beach chasing bunker pods that keep showing up and disappearing with the tide — when you see the bunker nervous on top, that's your cue, not a guarantee.

Bluefish have been the more reliable customer through Plum Gut itself. The current there is no joke on a new-moon spring tide — I've seen it run like a river at max flow — and the blues stack up in the eddies off the Gut approach where the water slackens just enough to hold. Diamond jigs, half-ounce to two-ounce depending on the stage of tide, worked with a fast jig-and-drop through the rip has been taking choppers in the three-to-six-pound range. Best window is that hour around the tide change when the current eases and the jig can actually get down before it's swept sideways. Don't fight the full flood or full ebb out there — you'll just lose gear on the bottom and your patience with it.

Porgies have been steady and honest, which is about the nicest thing I can say about scup — they don't lie to you. Sandworms and clam bellies fished on the bottom over the reef structure off Mattituck Inlet and around Rocky Point have kept the bait-and-can crowd happy, decent-sized fish, nothing spectacular but a full cooler if you put your time in. Blackfish are out of season on my beat right now so I won't dwell on it, but I'll tell you the rock piles that hold tog in the fall are the same ones holding bass right now — worth remembering come autumn.

Fluke is where the story's really moving this week, though most of that story is happening west of me in the bay, not on my Sound side. What's pushed things along here is that the bay water's climbed uncomfortably warm — pushing near 79 degrees in the back bays by some reports — and that's shoved fluke out of the shallow flats and into the inlets and channels chasing cooler, cleaner water. On my beat that means Mattituck Inlet itself has been the better bet lately rather than the open Sound flats. Working the outgoing tide with four-inch white Gulp Swimming Mullets on half-ounce bucktails, dragged slow along the channel edge where it dumps into the Sound, has been the more productive approach than drifting open water. Fish are there, but you have to go find the current seam, not just anchor and hope.

Weakfish I'll be straight with you about — quiet. I know the warm-water talk out of the Delaware has some folks thinking weakfish ought to be showing up thick, but warm water alone doesn't make a run, and we've had next to nothing worth reporting on this beat. I'm not writing that species off for the season, but I'm not selling you a bill of goods on it either.

Looking ahead, my time this weekend is going into that Friday-through-Monday sunset flood window — Horton Point and Rocky Point both, working eels and bucktails through the last hour of light. If the bass don't cooperate there, Plum Gut on the tide change is my fallback for blues, and the inlet mouth stays in play for fluke as long as that bay water keeps running hot and pushing fish our way. New-moon springs cut two ways out here — big current means big opportunity, but it also means you fish the slack windows or you fish nothing at all.