Thankful for Albies – and Billionaires

If you listen closely on the water each day off Montauk so far this late summer and early fall, you will hear a collective sigh of relief each day. That is the sound of fishing guides and light-tackle fishermen thanking the fishing gods for the daily emergence of the false albacore.

Whether you call them albies, falsies or by their proper name, little tunny (my second-favorite species name, after carpet shark), the return of the species in big numbers this year, and in some numbers to Shinnecock Inlet, has been a joyous occasion in so many ways.

First of all, there are few fish that have attracted a cult following like albies have. Striped bass among surfcasters is one of the others, but albie addicts really are addicts, and they respond to word of a good albie bite much like addicts instantly scheming about how best to score the next fix.

And albies had been frustratingly, and somewhat concernedly, absent the last two fall seasons.

In 2023, a couple of big passing hurricanes conspired to ruin the kind of conditions that albies like, and it sent them up into Long Island Sound for most of their fall smorgasbord. There were some pretty good days around Montauk, but it was not a great season, and the Shinnecock Inlet region had a pretty terrible year entirely.

Last year was bad — scary bad if you were a fishing guide. There were effectively no albies anywhere. A few would pop up here or there for a day or two, but nothing ever settled in. A lot of panicked fishing guides and anglers started worrying about the reasons; there has been a lot of talk about needing limits on the harvest of false albacore, which are soaring in popularity as bait in southern states.

So when the albies flooded back into our waters over the Labor Day weekend, those sighs of relief flowed forth. And they’ve continued as the fishing has gotten better and better. Yes, the waters are crowded again with boats flinging tins and flies into the boils of albies — but we’ll take it over bobbing around alone with nothing to cast at.

Shinnecock Inlet has even had some days of good fishing off the jetties — though it’s still been nothing like the spectacular runs between the early 1990s and 2020. We all wonder why that is and hope there is an answer that can be acted upon.

I think it is without question a change in the make-up of bait in and around Shinnecock Bay — namely, the absence of rain minnows, or bay anchovies, as they are really called, that simply do not come out of the bay in huge, reddish-brown clouds like they used to. What days of good albie fishing there have been, the albies were feeding mainly on baby bluefish, which is not a good thing for other reasons I’ll get into below.

The albies still come by Shinnecock. In fact, it seems to be one of their first stops. But they just don’t linger like they used to, and they almost never come into the bay itself, crashing through the schools of bait that didn’t know they had entered the gauntlet.

It is somewhat early still; there are some faint reasons for hope that Shinnecock may see its albie fishing ramp up again as the air and waters cool and more bait starts to make moves toward the open ocean.

Sadly, perhaps the biggest reason we are all so glad there are a ton of albies in Montauk is that there ain’t nothing else.

Shinnecock fishermen have had good fluke fishing and are enjoying a great yellowfin tuna bite fairly close to home in the last few weeks.

The churning, frothing striped bass and bluefish “blitzes” that have defined fishing in Montauk for decades, and made it the mecca for tens of thousands of surfcasters, are a thing of the past for all intents and purposes. Glimpses of a lost era materialize once in a while but are a faint recreation of what used to be and are fleeting at that. There were a couple of days around Shagwong and Clark’s Cove when bluefish blitzed for about an hour each day last week. Zero striped bass.

All the components are there. The waters off Montauk on my sounder are absolutely choked with bait species: rain minnows, sandeels, bunker, mackerel, squid, even some sardines and a few mullet. But there aren’t any predators to feast on them, except the albies.

Montauk, the vaunted “Surfcasting Capital of the World,” is a waste of gas money for most surfcasters now.

New York State got blind lucky this past weekend for the Fred Golofaro Memorial Montauk Surf Fishing Classic, when a few nice-sized stripers moved into the Montauk surf just a few days before the tournament. There were nothing like the numbers of fish caught in past years, but the weather was spectacular and the fishing was decent, and the tournament saw something like 120 fishermen sign up, and a 45-inch fish (everything goes by length now, since you can’t keep stripers over 31 inches) took home the trophy.

I can’t think of the last time there were 120 surfcasters in Montauk on a single day.

While we were albie fishing on Saturday morning, a friend remarked at how Turtle Cove — once the living room of the surfcasting community, the place where all surfcasters, first-timers, tourists, novices, dilettantes and sharpies all came together at some point — was completely devoid of anglers on a beautiful Saturday morning in October. In 2005, there would have been at least 100, maybe 150, in some stage of fishing, preparing to fish, or observing others fishing and/or falling over themselves. And there would have been 30 more on the rocks to the west, and another 30 on the stone revetment under the lighthouse, and another 30 on the bluff in Camp Hero looking down to see if they should join in.

If anyone in the fishing world doubts the clear and unequivocal evidence that the striped bass stock is in dire straits, they need look no further than Montauk’s shores.

In fact, if it wasn’t for Montauk having become the darling of the chic city party crowd and the billionaires who love hanging around them, the state of the striped bass population could actually have caused a serious financial crisis among local businesses. We hear so often from commercial fishermen that every rule imposed on them is going to “destroy communities.” But the loss of striped bass and the thousands of surfcasters who were the anchor of the shoulder season in Montauk for decades actually could.

I guess we all should thank the gods for poser billionaires driving rust bucket jeeps in arbitrary trucker hats.

Catch ’em up, albie addicts and everyone else. See you out there.