THE East End has become a hotbed of media activity the past week and while many are more concerned with shark sightings than celebrity sightings, all anyone seems to talk about is the big Georgica Gut caper.
You all know the story by now; under the cloak of darkness a small group of undercover dredgers opened up Georgica Pond and drained it into the Atlantic. It’s a very serious matter that threatened nearby piping plover nests.
“It also ruined some of the best blue claw crabbing we have out here,” said Harvey Bennett, who runs The Tackle Shop in Amagansett. Blue claws had taken up residents in the pond years ago and had become a great place to go crabbing late in the summer.
Draining the pond did attract blues and stripers to the beaches in the area and created some good surf fishing for a while. Finding the culprits is going to be a tall order.
A number of old-timers say that the East Hampton Town officials have a pretty good idea who was behind it, but to prove it, they’re going to have to come up with a smoking shovel.
The guys who dug the canal were most likely a couple of summertime workers who came out looking for work, said one long-time resident. “These guys were probably paid a good buck to do the job, but they’re long gone now,” said the source.
Meanwhile, the return of puffer fish to Three Mile Harbor was good to news to some. Pufferfish, also called blowfish, had not been seen around the East End in years.
And what’s up with these porgies? They seem to be everywhere along both the North and South Forks and in the bays in between. They’re also big, with 3-to-4-pound fish the norm rather than the exception. They’ve also been great for the party boat business.
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The New Jersey Dept. of Environmental Protection made a big media event out of the NYC subway cars it’s adding to the reefs off the Jersey Coast. The first of 250 cars were added to the Cape May Reef, while the rest will be added to Atlantic City Reef, Garden State North Reef and the Shark River Reef.
This is all well and good for anglers and divers, but DEP Commissioner Bradley Campbell never mentioned that New Jersey let slip by over 600 cars that Delaware gladly accepted. He also forgot to mention that he put an eight-year moratorium on any more subway cars being accepted.
