For the second time I made the long trip from our area to the wilds of Oceanside Long Island for the CCA sponsored surf seminar. I have always considered that the drive across Staten Island and along the Belt Parkway into the concrete canyons of the Sunrise Highway to be the height of roadway danger. Anyone who has driven to Kennedy Airport can tell stories of traffic jams and wild driving. So, allowing for all this I left early in a blinding rainstorm and arrived there in less than an hour and a half with little hassle.

I was hoping to get as much out of this seminar as I did last year, but I anticipated some overlap with some of the same speakers that they had last year. It turned out that there was very little repetition of last year’s seminar because they had a different format for the speakers and there was plenty of new information.

The keynote-opening speaker was William “Doc” Muller who talked about some basics of surf fishing and really opened my eyes to fishing with bucktails. He fishes the surf by choice on both sides of the island and only uses artificials. His basic lure is the bucktail with pork rind (split tail red and white). He throws the bucktail first and foremost and only switches to plugs if conditions indicate surface feeding fish. His choice of size is dictated by the conditions so he chooses the size that can be worked just off the bottom at a steady speed. Muller recommends the steady speed and not a lot of jigging when working the bucktail. Another thing I noticed was that the guys with the bucktails used a type with a swinging hook going by the name a of the “Blue Frog Bucktails.” I bought a few of these from the manufacturer and passed them on to Captain Bill in hopes that he might be able to get a supply. Muller, by the way, always scores in the upper 10 or 20 in the New York Surf Fishing contest every year. Using bucktails in the surf on a regular basis…something worth looking into!

There was a panel discussion later on in which the panelists were asked to comment on where and how they would fish under certain conditions and at specific times of year. They were given a date and a weather report and asked to comment. This was based on real weather reports and dates, so this forced the panel to deal with reality. Although this was not specifically helpful to me, it would be interesting to try around here some time. Northwest wind seemed to be the most universally good condition throughout Long Island.

The final panel was the group that discussed focusing on the “Large.” There were representatives from all parts of the Island, and each had specific choices. There were the usual bottles, darters, (we should use these more often) and needlefish to be used at Montauk suggestions. But when pinned down to strictly big fish, the panel’s choices were: chunks, live eels and bucktails. The basic philosophy was that to catch large bass you have to focus on them and even ignore the blitzes of smaller fish. There were some specific suggestions for Montauk, but this is getting long enough for this report. So maybe next time (P.S.: the ride home only took about an hour and 40 minutes)