Birds and Other Nature Sightings

     This past Sunday I joined my friend Captain John on another tuna fishing adventure.  We did slightly better this time than our previous trip.  We boated one yellowfin tuna on Sunday whereas we were skunked the previous Monday.  There were plenty of Wilson’s storm-petrels around, but no tuna.  What we needed to find out on the water was a more communal feeding event, such as one that also includes shearwaters, whales and dolphins.  Tuna would certainly be in the area.  There were no such feeding frenzies in the areas that we covered.  The marine life in general on Sunday was slower than the past few trips.  We saw only one distant whale and just a few dolphins.  Other than plenty of storm-petrels, I was able to pick up just a couple great shearwaters and several Cory’s shearwaters . Left, great shearwater.  Right, Cory’s shearwater .   © S. Weiss Five Cory’s shearwaters sitting on water.   © S. Weiss In mid-morning we came upon two commercial fishing boats.  They were netters.

     On Monday I joined my friend, Captain John, on another tuna fishing trip.  The previous week we went out to the Hudson Canyon and did well with bluefin tuna.  This time we only went out about 40 - 50 miles to target yellowfin tuna.  The captain had good intelligence that the tuna bite was hot there the day before.  We left the dock at 4 a.m., but it took us longer than expected to reach our destination due to the thick fog.  It was a little dicey navigating through Barnegat Inlet out to the open ocean, but Captain John handled it well.  The foggy conditions lifted by the time we made it to the fishing grounds.  Apparently, others had similar reports as there were dozens of boats in the area. We fished the area into the afternoon but could not put a fish in the boat.  We saw only a handful of fish caught among all the vessels out on the water.  Despite the captain’s efforts, it turned into one of those “ you should have been here yesterday ” days.  Marine life in the area was bette