Bay Fluke Push Out to the Inlet as Shinnecock Heats Up Toward the New Moon

Last week the bay ran warm and slow. Light southerly wind for four straight days, not enough to build any real chop, but enough to keep the surface glassy and the bay water stacking heat. I had a thermometer reading pushing into the high 70s in the guts off Tiana and up toward the canal, and that's too warm for fluke to sit still in six feet of water all day. They didn't disappear — they moved. By Thursday the drift in the bay had gone quiet and the action shifted hard toward the channel edges and the inlet itself, which is exactly what you'd expect when the flats turn into a bathtub. The moon's been sliding down toward new, which was already tightening up the tide swings by midweek, and that thinner current made the fish even less willing to fight for a meal in open bay — they wanted structure and moving water, not a flat drift over sand.

This week the moon goes new, and that means spring tides building right through the weekend — bigger swings, stronger current in the inlet, more water moving on the outgoing. That's the single biggest thing I'm watching. A bigger outgoing means more bait getting flushed out of the bay and past the rocks at the inlet, and that's when the stripers stack up on the drop. I'd also keep an eye on the ocean side — the incoming tide has been running clean the last few days, no discolored runoff, and that clean water at the inlet mouth is prime territory for the first Spanish mackerel or bonito showing up this time of year. It's late in that window — first LI bonito reports usually taper off after mid-July — but the water's right for it right now.

The fluke bite has been honestly mixed in the open bay, and I'm not going to sell you otherwise. Guys drifting the flats off Tiana Beach with bucktail and Gulp combos were getting a lot of short strikes and undersized fish for most of last week — too much bait, too much heat, fish just picking. But move to the channel edges near the canal entrance, or drift the deeper cuts inside the inlet itself on the last two hours of the outgoing, and the size picks up. Chartreuse bucktails, half-ounce to three-quarter depending on current, tipped with a 4-inch white Gulp Swimming Mullet, worked slow along bottom in 12 to 18 feet — that's been the combination putting keepers in the box, mostly 19 to 22 inches, with the occasional fish pushing 24. The bite window is tight, usually the two hours around the tide change when the current slows enough for the fish to commit but hasn't gone fully slack.

Striped bass are where I spend my nights, and the inlet on the outgoing remains the most honest bet in this entire zone. I've been working the rock jetty on the west side an hour after sunset, casting swimming plugs and darters into the current seam where the outgoing meets the deeper hole, and connecting with schoolies and a few bigger fish in the 28 to 34 inch range, mostly on bunker-colored swimmers worked with a slow, steady retrieve right along the edge of the white water. Live eels drifted on a fish-finder rig through that same seam have also been producing after midnight, when the smaller boat traffic clears out and the fish settle back into their lanes. With the new moon spring tides building through the weekend, that outgoing current is going to run harder and longer than it has in weeks — I expect the bite window to widen, not just at the peak of the drop but for a solid hour before and after. If you can only fish one night this week, I'd pick Saturday or Sunday when the tide swing is near its biggest and the current through the inlet channel is really ripping.

Weakfish at Ponquogue Bridge have been quiet, and I want to be straight about that rather than pretend otherwise. A few scattered fish came off the bridge lights at night on bucktail-and-twister-tail combos worked slow along the pilings, but it's nothing like a real push yet. Worth a stop on your way to or from the inlet, especially right at the bottom of the outgoing when the current slackens around the pilings, but don't build a whole trip around it right now. Porgies are still mostly a daytime, high-tide affair around the bridge structure and the deeper holes toward the canal — standard hi-lo rigs with clam are getting steady action in the one to one-and-a-half pound range, nothing spectacular but reliable if you want bent rods for the kids. Blackfish are still mostly holding on the deeper structure toward the ocean side and haven't turned on in any real way yet — that's a September story, not a July one.

Looking ahead, the new moon spring tides are the whole ballgame this week. Bigger swings mean a stronger flush through the inlet, which should keep pulling bait — and stripers behind it — out of the bay and into that current seam at night. If the incoming stays clean on the ocean side, I'd make at least one run to the inlet mouth with a light spinning rod and small metal jigs just in case those bonito or Spanish mackerel show up in numbers before that pelagic window closes. My plan for the week: nights at the inlet jetty on the outgoing for bass, mornings working the channel edges near the canal for fluke before the sun gets high and pushes them back into the depths. If the bass don't show on a given night, the fluke in the channel are my fallback — and if both are slow, there's always a bucket of clams and the bridge pilings for porgies while I wait for the tide to turn.