Big fluke show up as bluefish tournament hits Long Island Sound

What's biting

What's next

With the Greatest Bluefish Tournament on Earth converging on Long Island Sound this weekend (per The Fisherman (Northeast)), expect boat traffic at classic blue water like The Race and Plum Gut to spike, which should stir up bait and could help concentrate the bigger blues AW Marina's customers have been hoping to see move in. This week's full moon also means stronger tidal swings, worth planning around — J&B Tackle already ties the best striper bite to dawn and dusk with live eels at night, a pattern that should hold or sharpen as tidal flow increases.

Fluke fishing looks primed to stay strong into the weekend. Black Hawk's multi-fish, up-to-11-pound drift suggests fish are stacked and feeding actively; J&B Tackle's report of keeper fluke and sea bass from Black Point, Niantic Bay, and Two Tree Channel gives a starting list of spots worth checking first, with bigger models reportedly coming from the Montauk side. Sea bass and scup, per Tartan II, have been trending upward after a slow start, and nothing in this week's reports suggests that improvement stalling — bottom fishing at those same structure spots should keep producing into early September.

Bluefish remain the wildcard. The current bite is steady but on the smaller side, with the hope — not yet confirmed — that bigger fish move in ahead of the tournament. Anglers heading out this weekend should treat that as a maybe rather than a given, and lean on the more consistent bottom bite (fluke, sea bass, scup) as the higher-probability plan, using bluefish activity at The Race and Plum Gut as a bonus rather than the main target.

Longer term, late summer typically starts giving way to the first stirrings of the fall run in this region. Regional reports out of Rhode Island (Saltwater Edge Blog (RI)) and Cape Cod already note bonito and scattered early false albacore pushing into local waters — a trend worth watching for spillover into western Sound waters as temperatures ease off their summer peak in the coming weeks.

Context

Late August into early September is a fairly predictable transition window for Long Island Sound: summer species like fluke, scup, and black sea bass are typically near their seasonal peak before action shifts toward the fall striper and bluefish run through September and October. This week's Connecticut reports read as consistent with that pattern rather than a deviation — Tartan II's note that sea bass 'keep improving after a somewhat slow start,' and Black Hawk's standout fluke drift, both look typical for this point in the calendar rather than an early or late anomaly.

AW Marina's description of a 'bit of a late summer lull' for the broader bite, paired with undersized bluefish at usually productive spots like The Race and Plum Gut, also reads as a normal late-August lull rather than a red flag — this stretch often sits between the summer bottom-fishing peak and the larger migratory blues and stripers that typically build through September.

There is no buoy or gauge data available this cycle to compare Sound water temperatures against typical late-August norms, so this note leans on angler-reported patterns rather than measured trends. Regionally, reports from Rhode Island and Cape Cod (Saltwater Edge Blog (RI), The Fisherman (Northeast)) describing bonito and the first scattered false albacore of the season are consistent with a fall transition tracking on a normal early-fall timeline for southern New England.