Allan Appel Photo
Summertime … and the fish were jumping. At least at the Mill River bridge off Lombard between East and James they were.
Thousands of bunker swirled beneath the span at high tide.
A fisherman without his pole, Freddie Morales, strolled by and said, “I wish I owned a bait shop.”
It was late Tuesday morning. Normally, Morales said, he snags a few bunker with a three-way-hook, takes the bunker, which are bait fish, and goes to do more serious fishing further down the Mill where it passes under Chapel Street. His other favored spot is off the Tomlinson Avenue Bridge, he said.
Morales explained that the schools of bunker swirl in narrows under bridges in their attempt to escape the striped bass and the blue fish that lunge at them to eat them from below.
“The stripers and blue fish like the deeper water,” he said.
As the fish moved slowly under the bridge and downstream in a large swirling circle, you could hear the splashes of the lunging hunters and the dashes of the hunted as they breached the surface of the water.
Mill River looking south from Lombard/Humphrey Street Bridge.
Also visible on the backs and flanks of the bunker were red blotches. In the sunlight you might mistake them for coloration. In fact they were bloody bite marks.
Morales took off his Miami Heat cap and looked wistfully at the action below.
“You should go to the Grand Avenue Bridge, man. You see stripers this big,” he said, indicating a length of about two shoe boxes.
Then he put on his cap, walked to East Street and turned south. “I wish I could go fishing,” he said, “but I have to pick up my wife.”
Hate to rain on everyone's parade, but the Stiped Bass and Bluefish that you can catch in Long Island Sound and the surrounding rivers (Mill R.,Quinnipiac R.) are FULL OF PCBs!! The DEEP recommends that you eat at most 1 meal per month.
http://www.ct.gov/dph/lib/dph/environmental_health/eoha/pdf/ificatchit_2012_english.pdf