Suffering winter flounder abuse

Excerpts from Suffering Winter Flounder Abuse by Bob Sampson.

• Last weekend Eric Covino and I made our annual winter flounder abuse trip. As usual, the flatfish did all the abusing. We fished at Poquonnock River in Groton, along with 40 or 50 other people. We only managed a couple of short hits and saw perhaps 10 other fish caught during the two hours we spent fishing the first part of the ebb tide.
• Back during the late-1960s and '70s when winter flounder were abundant, catching enough for a meal wasn't even a challenge. In high school and early college years, before any of us had a boat, friends and I would make a couple trips every spring to fish the Mystic or Pawcatuck Rivers and generally be fairly successful. Unfortunately, the areas we fished in those days, just downriver from the draw bridge in Mystic, are now private and closed to fishing. Those early trips were usually fairly productive and never required much work.
• Winter flounder were usually a secondary or afterthought sort of species when they were easy to catch. Because the populations were fairly large three decades ago, it was possible to catch them much later into the spring. Early fishing took place in the upper ends of estuaries, such as the Mystic or Niantic Rivers or in smaller coves such as Jordan Cove in Waterford or Quannaduck Cove in Stonington.
• Anglers would fish from shore or small car-top boats from ice-out till about mid-April. Then, from that time on, the rapidly warming inshore spots would dry up as post-spawn flatfish poured out of their winter haunts into the Sound. That's when places like the lower Thames, Niantic Bay, Horse Shore Reef and the dumping grounds off Groton would produce fish until early summer, with a few deep water holes yielding catches to flatfish specialists all summer long.

Flounder history

• The life history of winter flounder is as their name implies. They would move inshore and up into shallow areas. When they were abundant, the water under the Interstate 95 Bridge in the Mystic River was a hot spot during the middle of what was the shotgun deer season during the 1970s. Those fish would winter in places like that, Rhode Island's salt ponds and other protected dents along the coast, spawn at something like 39 to 42 degrees and the big ones would leave the shallow coves that warm so early by the time temperatures were poking into the 50s.
• They do like it cold. hat is when the deeper waters of the coast and eventually the Sound would produce fish as the larger members of the population headed offshore to deeper waters, with the waters of Block Island Sound being primary summering grounds for the species.
• Unregulated trawling, spearing in wintering grounds and rod-and-reel fishing when these fish were highly concentrated and vulnerable during the winter and spring did a job on them by the 1980s and the warm weather that decade finished them off. Commercial draggers hammered them from the second they left their spawning areas right through the summer where they would escape the heat in the deeper waters of Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound.
• Rhode Island, which has always been at the mercy of their commercial fisherman, (to my horror and disbelief) actually allowed fishermen to tow otter trawls in their small salt ponds. This was during the middle of the spring spawning season when they were concentrated and highly vulnerable. That practice was allowed for a number of years and was only halted after it was too late to do much good for the flounder. It wasn't all fishing pressure, though a good deal of the decline in this species can be blamed on overharvest by both recreational and commercial fishermen.

Tough to find:

• Last spring there were actually a surprising number of reports of anglers actually bringing home 10-fish limits. Niantic Bay and the waters of western Long Island Sound around the Norwalk area seemed to produce the best catches. But sadly, a good day's catch wouldn't have been considered a good hour of winter flounder fishing three decades ago.
• The bottom line is that this species is back on the spring fishing menu and not just in words. There are actually a few of them around to play with. Anyone who is willing to explore a few areas can probably learn how to catch these fish on a regular basis. John Hillyer, owner of Hillyer's Tackle in Waterford, was catching limits of flatfish for a month straight last spring.
• Catching winter flounder is not rocket science, because the angling techniques are very basic. Finding the spots and concentrations of fish within the spots is the trick to success.