A few of you have e-mailed and asked if I’d fallen off the face of the planet. After all, I hadn’t posted a local fishing report in at least 3 days!

One of nine false albacore landed in a morning’s fishing off of Montauk, New York.

Paul Dixon and I with a false albacore in hand and a mountain of water coming in behind us. We experienced 8 foot seas less than a 1/2 mile off the beach.

Here the Atlantic Ocean slams into North America at Montauk Point Lighthouse shrouded in fog.

Well, I didn’t fall of the planet, but I did venture to the end of the continent … to Montauk, NY, to be exact, on the extreme eastern end of Long Island.

Each fall loads of baitfish (rainfish and bunker, mainly) exit Long Island Sound headed south down the East Coast as the Sound’s waters begin to cool.

These smaller fish are intercepted at Montauk by southward-migrating schools of striped bass, bluefish, and false albacore.

If you’re lucky and the wind, weather, and tides allow, the fishing can be spectacular.

I linked up with local guide Paul Dixon and, despite heavy seas caused by a stiff east wind the day before and fog during the first 90 minutes of our trip, we got onto some nice fish.

In all I hooked 11 false albacore, also called “little tunny” and landed 9, with other “blowups” that didn’t result in hookups.

Paul had me using a “Deadly Dick” slender jigging spoon for distance work and a white Sluggo topwater soft plastic bass lure for close-in work.

False albacore are in the tuna family and are very hard fighters. We boated fish in the 7 pound class using medium-heavy weight freshwater spinning gear spooled with braid and a fluorocarbon leader. Average fight duration was an honest 3.0 to 3.75 minutes with numerous drag stripping runs after an initial long run on the hookup.

If you like “destination fishing”, you need to time this for mid-September to mid-October and do it!!