Bluefish Future, B Sampson, Jr.

Bluefish of all age classes, from 6-inch snapper bluefish to 8-pound plus "choppers," are very abundant throughout the region this season. This year's crop of juvenile or "snapper blues" literally inundated every estuary, cove, jetty and dock along the entire coast around the middle of August, which bodes well for the future of bluefishing in the region.

This year's class of 2005 bluefish, along with all their cousins will be in direct competition with the striped bass, fluke, weakfish, and other even more desirable species for the same food sources throughout the next decade. Over time this competition and possible depletion of some bait sources, could cause changes in the feeding habits of the bluefish themselves as well as the other major predators they compete with for food. The good thing is, this hot summer evidently promoted successful breeding of about every species of bait fish up and down the southern New England coast.

Bluefish have a mix of physical characteristics and behaviors of both in- and off-shore fish. Their deeply forked rigid tail is designed for swimming fast and for long distances. The dark red meat on their flanks provides long-term swimming ability, two traits that when combined gives them their ability to fight so darn hard at the end of a fishing line. When hooked, many a 10- or 12-pound bluefish has been mistaken to be a striped bass of two to three times that weight. The bottom line is, bluefish are one very fun and exciting fish to catch, even if they are easy. Right now literally all of the tackle shops in the region echo the same story. They say snapper bluefish are as abundant as we've ever seen them.

"Cocktail blues," those 1- to 3-pounders are literally everywhere along the coast and so abundant they are becoming a pain in the butt to anglers targeting other species. There's also a pretty good crop of 5- to 8-pound fish around that are occasionally mixed in with 10-pound or better choppers that are capable of taking a coffee cup-sized chunk out of a fish. I've seen it happen many times through the years during the fall.

The Race is the epicenter of all the bluefishing activity in this area, but you don't have to own a big boat to get in on the fun. There are head boats such as the Hel-Cat out of Groton, the Mijoy, Sunbeam and Blackhawk nested between the bridges in Niantic that will take anglers out for a half- or full-day trip, along with the rods and bait for about $40 to 50 per person.

Locally, anglers have a fairly unique opportunity to catch bluefish and stripers during this time of in-shore feeding frenzies right here in the Thames River. Joe Balint of the Fish Connection in Preston has been going out and nailing the "snarbor blues" pretty hard every evening after work. By the way, snarbors are those two-year old bluefish that range in size between the tiny snappers and mid-sized harbor bluefish. Joe said when you get on the fish you can almost always catch a small bluefish on every cast, noting how he went five-for-five while casting poppers into a surface feeding frenzy on the Thames.

Most of the bluefish and school-striped bass in the river now are small, but Joe said that a school of adult menhaden that has been in the upper Thames and Norwich Harbor for a week or so has attracted the attention of some larger bluefish and striped bass.