Montauk

A long, but utterly unique and successful trip with finback whale mom and calf, and some dolphins! We travelled to an area that is one of the major whale feeding areas off Montauk and found nothing. We continued ENE for a while and turned to head back on a more northerly route, and then we saw the massive blow of an adult finback whale, and a faint blow of her calf! This is a new finback whale mom/calf pair for us, and what a pair it was! The calf kept swimming under and around our bow, then mom came up close to us. We were being “mugged” by both whales. These whales stayed so close to us that we could not move. Doing this for nearly 4 decades, I (Dr. Artie Kopelman, CRESLI president and senior scientist) have never seen…

Yesterday’s trip was punctuated with sightings from the start, and not limited to cetaceans. Our first-of- the-season sighting of bunker (Atlantic menhaden), an extremely important prey fish for a myriad of marine predators, kicked off our departure past the lighthouse. And not surprisingly, shortly thereafter, we encountered a large pod of Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphin. The pod was separated into two distinct groups, each consisting of tightly-packed individuals including adults, juveniles, and a few neonates (newborns) diving and surfacing together, with occasional tail slaps on the surface. While the sighting was invigorating, we decided to use our time wisely and continue east where baleen whales were seen on previous trips. As we transited, the sea boiled almost continuously with bait fish and occasional tuna, before the largest thing of all broke the surface behind us: a submarine! A possible spinner shark…

Captain Carl reports another beautiful afternoon and we had some good fishing too! We started out with lots of action, but mostly shorts. After a quick move, we found some much better size keeper Fluke and Seabass that we worked on for the rest of the trip! The pool winner was Jay Anh from Queens,…

Capt. Dave reports an excellent morning of fishing today. We started out by the lighthouse where we caught some really nice size Porgies. We then ventured over near Block Island where we tried our luck at some Seabass. We got some Seabass the bite wasn’t amazing today, we had a lot of shorts that had…

Captain Carl reports a beautiful morning today for our half day fishing trip. We caught plenty of the usual suspects of Fluke, Sea Bass, and Porgies, but the keeper ratio was down today. Plenty of action, just not that many keepers.  

A challenging but successful day! We left the dock expecting to escape from the heat and we did. We encountered wind and expected 4-5′ seas. We found a pod of about 20-10 Tamanend’s bottlenose dolphins about 1.5 nautical miles from Montauk Point. We then headed ESE, experiencing the classic “old-time rock-and- roll” of 4-5′ seas for a few hours. We traveled through the area in which we’d found whales, dolphins, and pelagic birds on Monday 7/33/25. Spotting blows at distance was challenging due to all the white caps, and the wind, and waves. We searched and traveled and then at about 20 nm out, a finback whale blew 100 yards ahead of us! We could see the blows  (3 or 4 a few seconds apart, and the whale would go down for a terminal dive of 5-10 minutes, then come…

Capt Dave reports an excellent and lively fishing on the Viking Starship. We had a busy Porgy fishing near the Lighthouse with a mix of sizes. Then we moved a little offshore to get some Fluke and Sea Bass. The first place pool winner was Santiago Fuerte from Brooklyn, NY with a 3.6 lb Porgy….

Captain Steven Sr. reports a good day of fishing with plenty of action. Although there were a few shorts we still managed to catch some nice KEEPER Flukes, Sea Bass, and Porgies. Congratulations to our first place pool winner, Nicolas Sullivan from Montauk, NY, who caught a 4.0 lb Fluke. Another congratulations to our runner…

Captain Mike Ricker reports an afternoon filled with steady rod-bending. We had some great Sea Bass action. The Fluke fishing was also steady but unfortunatly most of them were on the shorter side. We also had some Porgies making it over the rails. It was a great afternoon for fishing! Congratulations to our pool winner,…

Capt JR reports a fair day of Block Island fishing onboard the Viking Starlite. The Sea Bass were EVERYWHERE. So, it wasn’t an issue finding plenty of big Knot Heads to go around. The Fluking was at times red hot with double headers coming up. But, the size was a bit of an issue. We…