Mark Alan Lovewell
, The fishing is about to change big time, when the 66th annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby opens this Sunday. A week of wet weather, remnant of two tropical storms, has only stirred the waters around the Vineyard. The fish are here. Many anglers are poised and waiting.
The month-long fishing contest that offers more than a quarter of a million dollars in prizes is about to begin.
This was a fine summer for weather. There was plenty of sunshine, plenty of good sailing weather and enough rain. The three months that make up summer on the Vineyard, June through August, were in large part visitor friendly. Rainfall events were more often short, frequent and at night, which would please both the swimmer and the farmer.
There were only a few significant weather events: a hurricane that missed the Island and a rare severe thunderstorm in July that produced a lot of lightning and thunder and a quick, heavy shower.
The Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group had one of its most productive summers, mass producing millions of baby quahaugs, bay scallops and oysters. And to top it all off, the shellfish hatchery produced twice the usual numbers of bay scallop seed.
Volunteer Edgartown shellfishermen worked the tides last week to transfer young bay scallops out of harm’s way at Cape Pogue Pond, after an algae bloom seen a year ago returned.
Cochlodinium polykrikoides, a single-cell dinoflagellate, staged a late-summer comeback in the large, pristine bay that lies north of the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick. The algae is not harmful to humans but can be toxic to shellfish.
Menhaden were back in Cuttyhunk harbor this summer, and that was good news to Capt. Bruce Borges. Pogies, as they are called, make great bait for catching striped bass. As a lobsterman, Captain Borges, 74, hasn’t seen much good news along the waterfront in recent years. There are fish out there but it’s a different story for lobsters, and that has made this summer especially challenging for Mr. Borges, who calls himself the last lobsterman on Cuttyhunk.
Fresh fish is landed daily at Menemsha and much of it is being shipped to the mainland by Alec Gale. With his operation set up in what was once a lobster shack, the 34-year-old is shipping more this summer than he has shipped before.
A key ingredient to his success is ice. He manufactures and sells ice by the bucket and fish box. Boats are loading up with his ice before they head out of the harbor, and they are coming back with boxes full of iced fish.