The Newsmagazine of Long Beach Island and Southern Ocean County

By Jay Mann | on May 26, 2022

STRIPER DAD: Out of the fog, Chris Delorenzo lands a bass, delighting his son CJ, 5, who is ready to dig a hole for storing the fish. Surfcasters have been finding keepable stripers with some sizable enough to warrant a sand covering. (Photo by Jack Reynolds)

It’s that holiday weekend when we let the summerness begin, despite the calendar technically clinging to springiness. The summer solstice, marking the longest day of the year, takes place on June 21 at 5:13 a.m.

As a daylight aficionado, I always find it a bit disheartening that the first day of summer marks the start of shorter days, a lessening of daylight time. Of course, thinking in more worldly terms, my Aussie friends begin getting longer days on June 20. What a weird world, though I wouldn’t trade it for the …

There is some technical merit to marking the Memorial Day weekend as the start of summer since climatologists consider “meteorological summer” as running from June 1 to Aug. 31.

WE WERE SOLDIERS THEN: While this weekend rates near the top as a party-hearty time – as many college kids get in some quick fun before the summer workload kicks in – it is with a pride-laden somberness that we reflect on those far-too-many soldiers who didn’t get the chance to party on, instead giving everything so we could let the good times roll.

I have no qualms in suggesting we parlay their sacrifice into partying terms. I can assure they would gladly accept such an upbeat concept as part of their legacy, considering how young so many of them were.

Virtually all Boomers had friends killed in the Vietnam “conflict,” among the nastiest wars ever waged. My abiding memories of friends lost, among them a female nurse who had been a school cheerleader, are time-sealed images from when we innocently shared classes or passed in school hallways.

While a day honoring them is nice and all, the greatest honor is to always keep them in hearts and minds, a carefully chosen expression, closely bound to that wartime period.

In memoriam: We couldn’t have gotten to this point in our lives without you.

TORRENTIAL POLLEN: This week’s weirdness appeared on my windshield. I was taking part in a wild turkey count in a bygone community known as Buddtown. I spent many hours following telltale turkey scratches in leaf litter while listening for very frequent turkey sound-offs, including clucks, purrs, yelps, cackles, cutts, kee kee runs and the proverbial gobble.

After tracking down an angry hen, its pouts (chicks), and the biggest tom I had ever seen, I returned to my truck, jumped in, and instantly realized I had zero visibility. My windshield had been so heavily put upon by pollen that I seriously could not see through it. It was yet another first for me – in these times when firsts are popping up like there’s no tomorrow. Just an expression, mind you.

A subtle rush came when I flipped on my windshield wipers, resulting in a yellow cloud of swirling pollen. Pollen is definitely born to go airborne.

When I was driving home, there were woodland stretches where pollen clouds made it look like something was on fire up ahead. I wasn’t the only one seeing the weird display. Facebook and Google confirmed there was an all-time pollen performance taking place. An amazing aerial shot captured what genuinely looked like scores of wildfires breaking out across the Pinelands. The website 943thepoint.com highlighted that photo, headlining “Raging Pollen Or Forest Fire?” It offered, “The picture really could be mistaken for a full-on forest fire caught on camera. Plumes of pollen have been finding their way onto our cars, through our windows, and up to our noses.”

I’ll surmise the super showing had to do with the late coolness this spring. Near-freezing April nights held back the tree blossoming process. When an open window of warmer weather presented itself, the arboreal realm exploded forth.

Fortunately, I don’t suffer from pollenesque allergies, so I can’t say what this pollen downpour feels like to sufferers. I can readily speak of insufferable clouds of flying insects in many Pineland areas. As to ticks, they’re present and accounted for, pretty much on par for the always tickafied course. Not so up Maine way, where folks are spooked over an ongoing explosion of winter ticks, which are taking the lives of young moose, succumbing to the effects of blood drawn by mind-boggling numbers of bloodsuckers.

In a CBC news story headlined “Early research suggests winter ticks are killing young moose,” nervous Canadian researchers who rushed down to Maine estimate dying moose were covered with as many as 80,000 feasting ticks per suffering creature.

“It could represent sometimes up to half, up to two-thirds of the blood volume of a calf,” said Steeve Côté, a biologist at Laval University.

I’ll chime in that even 80,000 ticks represent only part of the blood taking. Since it takes two to three days for nymphs and four to seven days for adults to become fully engorged, a tick-tortured moose might be feasted upon for months before succumbing to the parasites. That 80,000-tick presence might come and go many times over, as satiated ticks fall off and new ones mount. The total bite count could be unspeakably unbearable.

I highlight this tickish topic due to its never-beforeness. Such sudden deadly tick infestations need immediate investigation. Virtually anything to do with ticks, anywhere, is an immediate matter of concern for us. Jersey has become tick central, a completely uninvited notoriety.

Per usual, the prime suspect for the Maine tick attacks is global warming. That has Canada understandably antsy over the prospect that close-by Maine’s mega-showings of winter ticks might work northward with long-term milder times in play.

Such routine blame-the-times thinking is fine and good but might be a cop-out, unadvisedly excluding other factors, natural or man-made, that could influence tick populations far and wide. For now, it remains a mystery how a species that had been held in proper natural control suddenly goes on a killing spree. Admittedly, winter ticks apparently army up, joining forces to go whole hog after a blood source. That’s sorta unique.

By the by, it’s highly doubtful New England’s winter tick species will sink down this way to join our tick menagerie.

MATERIALLY SPEAKING: I got a Rep. Jeff Van Drew press release reading, “Last week, I spoke in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which I serve on, in support of the Water Resources Development Act of 2022. This legislation passed through the T&I Committee this week and I secured several projects and policies including a national ‘Strategic Plan on the Beneficial Use of Dredged Material,’ which will cut governmental red tape, save taxpayers millions of dollars, and create environmental benefits. … This is a big win for South Jersey, and I look forward to this legislation coming to the House floor for a vote.”

I must look further into this, but it seemingly lays the groundwork – more like sandwork – for inlet-dredged material to regularly be placed on nearby beaches, as was experimentally tried last year when sand from a regular Barnegat Inlet dredging was offloaded atop a sandbar just off Harvey Cedars to see where the material might meander. Still awaiting word on that effort.

Should this Van Drew fund-seeking endeavor strike pay dirt, it could also lead to the strategic placement of bay bottom material, like that dredged from the ICW, to be pumped onto material-needy areas. There had been some initial discussion of bayside material off Holgate being pumped beachside. The Forsythe Refuge was cautiously amenable to at least looking into the possibility, though only for crossover pipes near the refuge’s north boundary.

STAY SAND SAFE: A quick beach note of the don’t-go-there variety. A tragic life-taking beach hole sand collapse just to our north has local first responders – and lifeguards, starting this weekend – doubly attuned to the all-too-real danger of sand digs gone south. LBI has had its share of sand submersions, which can be likened to immersions in water, with the weight of the sand doing the oxygen-depriving dirty work.

Many of us recall the onetime common beach pastime of “digging to China.” Such mindlessness fits the “It’s a wonder we survived” maxim.

My 10th Street (Beach Haven) buddies and I would dig holes downward, maybe 5 feet apart, then tunnel toward each other. Now and again there would be a collapse, and we’d pull each other out by the feet, laughing.

Here’s hoping all y’all will pitch in if you see any such inane sand digs on our summer beaches. Step in and stop the diggers in their tracks. If you don’t want to step in personally, quickly report egregious digs to the guards. They get paid the big bucks (smirk-smirk) to do the dirty “knock it off!” work.

See related sand rescue training story in this issue.

RUNDOWN: Winds of late have lost some of the over-spunk they had displayed almost all spring. On occasions they’ve been playing nice, allowing flukers to drift at a leisurely 2-ounce clip.

Calmer seas have also permitted anglers to head out to structure for the 10-fish “open season” on black sea bass; minimum size of 13 inches. This sea bass stint runs from May 17 to June 19. Many charters and head boats are at the ready for you to jump aboard for a meaty day.

Scoring a 10-fish sea bass day will likely require some freezing up. By far the finest way to do this is by simply gutting, scaling, rinsing, drying and individually freezing each whole fish. Sure, you can behead if you must, but keeping the head when freezing literally helps hold in the fish’s tastiness while staving off freezer burn. A frozen whole fish can be slowly thawed, then baked or BBQ’ed whole. All the meat can be carefully forked off for a delectable dining treat.

As to filleting sea bass for freezing, the meat gain isn’t all that great compared to keeping them in the round. What’s more, there is a certain taste decline after fillets thaw, though they present nicely in fish cakes or fish chowder.

There are blowfish and (soon) kingfish in the ’hood, but how about letting them do their spawn thing? Nabbing a couple/few for din-din is fine.

I’m getting word of many a slew of fine stripers coming out of the suds. They’re not all keepers, though the folks I’ve talked to sure don’t mind scoring throwback schoolies. A Camden County fellow, somewhat new to surfcasting, got a keeper (30-inch) and short “doubleheader” on a pompano rig. “I kept the bigger one, and my wife deep-fried strips of it in batter. Anyone who says (striper) doesn’t taste that good needs their taste buds examined,” he told me during a chance meeting at Wawa.

Per usual, I fully encourage anglers to keep allowable stripers, should they so choose. I’ll go as far as saying it’s ecologically unsound to think bass should become a purely catch-and-release fishery, as is being actively pursued by some organizations that refuse to see the bigger ecosystem picture – within which bass are fierce and efficient predators, easily able to eliminate less watched-over gamefish species.

Along those same over-mothering lines, I read a nastyish “comment” beneath a Facebook photo of a caught-photoed-released beach striper, a trophy-size fish to be sure. The commenter alleged the photo session had been too drawn out, based on the fish being held aloft – and had sand on it. “It probably died afterwards,” read the post. I say bull, as in striped bass being bulldogs. They’re Timexish: They can take a licking and keep on ticking – as younger readers wonder what the hell I’m talking about. Take my word for it, kids, John Cameron Swayze was cool. What/who!?

I’ll make a devil’s advocate case that beach-landed bass profit from at least a short stint out of water, during which any predators that had been eagerly stalking them during their struggle will lose interest and mosey off, factoring in shark attention spans – though even the densest sharks will wander off wondering “Where the hell did that thing just go?”

By the by, even the largest bass can fall prey to sharks. Decades back, while surfing Harvey Cedars, the late George Sellarole came running up to me holding just the head of what had very recently been a large-ass holistic striper. The stunning part was the fish’s gills were bright red … and still moving! If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. That poor bugger had just been sharked upon, right where we were simultaneously riding waves. Based on the sheer severing, I retrospectively determined it was a great white, with an emphasis on the “great.” Yes, we paddled right back out. We were convinced the shark was full, thank you very much.

Fluking is good to exceptional, though many a fluker will find that out firsthand this weekend.

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