The Farragut Story
The Farragut Striper Club evolved from the Farragut Rod and Gun Club, an organization founded in 1948. The Rod and Gun Club roster boasted 125 active hunters and fishermen during the its hey day. The Farragut Inn on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn (from which the club got its name) served as the original meeting place. As the years passed, and members moved out of Brooklyn, the club became inactive.

In 1966 a group of anglers who fished Riis Park and Fort Tilden (until the M.P.s caught them) decided to form their own group. In the small Riis Park parking lot Jerry Bernard wrote down the names of some of the regulars. At that moment, the Farragut Striper Club was born.

A week later, at P.S. 194 on Avenue W and Knapp Street, the men on that list had their first meeting. Members of the original Rod and Gun Club, who were still in the area, were also invited to join. Since the interest was primarily surf fishing, the name "Farragut Striper Club" was chosen. Art Wenner, who was a past president of the Farragut Rod and Gun Club, was elected as the new club’s president and served in that role from 1966 to 1970.

The club grew, and on March 22, 1969 the Farragut Striper Club had its first Awards Dinner Dance. The Knights of Columbus on Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay was to be the place, but as fate would have it, the hall burned down just before the event, and the K of C in Ridgewood had to be booked at the last minute.

As time passed, and members moved to the Long Island suburbs, the club’s meeting location moved east. For many years the club met in Valley Stream on Long Island, but more recently a new location was chosen in Massapequa.

Today, the club’s focus remains on surf fishing the northeast for striped bass, bluefish and weakfish. Membership is currently limited to 40. All members are active surf fishermen, and many log an impressive amount of time on the water. Members are free to experiment with all angling techniques. Many Farragut surfcasters have their niche, and specialize in such things as bucktailing, plugging, fishing rigged eels, bait fishing or flyfishing. Related skills or interests include plug making, fly tying, and rod building.

Current members concentrate their efforts on the north and south shores of Long Island. A healthy portion of the club relocates to Montauk for the fall. Interested members also plan trips to places like Cape Cod, Nantucket or Block Island.

The club has been active in conservation initiatives, including the Save Our Stripers (SOS) campaign. Over the years, the club has also participated in regional tournaments including Schaefer, Field and Stream, Atlantic City, and the New York Surf Fishing Contest. Today, members compete against each other in Farragut’s own club contest, and against other clubs in the New York Surf Fishing Contest. Competition can be intense, but is always friendly, since the Farragut Club is more about camaraderie and teaching fellow members how to become better fisherman.

Club activities also include fishing outings, an annual Christmas party, and the post-season awards dinner. In addition to supporting all related conservation efforts, the club strongly advocates catch-and-release. In recent years, more than 95% of all "keeper-sized" fish were released.

For more info, please email Farragut.

Or to contact us via snail mail
Farragut Striper Club
54 Birch Lane
Massapequa Park, NY 11762

Farragut Striper Club Announces Openings For  Few Dedicated Surfcasters

The Farragut Striper Club, one of the area’s oldest and most active surf fishing clubs, has announced openings for a few dedicated surfcasters.  Although Farragut is a small club (capped at 40), all members are active fishermen.  The club and its members have won a plethora of awards in contests and tournaments, but camaraderie (not competition) is really what the club is all about.  Club members are free to experiment with a variety of tackle and techniques.  Many Farragut surfcasters have a niche in areas like plugging, bucktailing, fishing rigged eels, fly fishing, and bait fishing.  Club members fish both shores of Long Island. A sizeable portion of the club relocates to Montauk for the fall. Interested members also plan trips to places like Cape Cod and Nantucket.

Applicants should be responsible, conservation-minded, and willing to participate. Surf fishing experience is helpful. Those with less surf experience should be willing to make a significant investment in time, as there much to learn. Meetings are held in Massapequa. If interested, please contact Dave Haase.  More information about the club is available on the club's website at 
 

Farragut Striper Club Contest Rules

The contest runs from April 1st to November 30th.

Only surf caught fish are eligible. This includes any and all land-based fishing (inlets, river banks, piers, jetties, etc.)

Points are awarded based on pounds. For example, a 20 lb. striped bass is worth 20 points. All fractional weights are rounded down to the next whole pound for calculation of club points. Striped bass must be at least 10 pounds, bluefish and weakfish must be at least 5 pounds.

Anglers are allowed to enter the best ten fish of each species for each month. This means that no more than 30 fish in total can be entered (10 bass, 10 blues and 10 weakfish). Anglers are encouraged not to weigh fish that have little chance of making the monthly cut-off.

Fish can only be weighed using:

(1) A tackle store with a certified scale
(2) A club certified hand scale (e.g. Manley, Chatillon) when the fish is released.

Members are encouraged to practice catch and release, and to seek a valid witness for contest eligible fish.

Note: For a fish to be eligible for the Interclub Largest of Species Award, if the fish is kept, it must be weighed in at a tackle store. If the fish is released, the weighing must be witnessed by an Interclub member in good standing.

Notes from the February 2000 Annual Meeting of the New York Surf "Interclub" Contest

1.  Only bone fide fishing clubs (who meet regularly, have a roster, have bylaws etc.) will be allowed to compete.

2.  The Boga Grip has been approved as an official scale.

3.  A proposal to ban bridge-caught fish, or have a separate bridge fishing division, was voted down.

4. Representatives from two different clubs got up to express their concern over  irregularities in the point submission process.  The President of one club stressed that it is the responsibility of each club, specifically the reporting officer of each club, to validate submissions made by his club.

Once again, let's remember what each angler must sign when a fish is submitted into the contest....

I certify that the following statements are true; that all contest fishing rules were complied with and that the witness hereto actually witnessed the weighing and measuring of the fish.

______________________
Signature of Angler
 

The rules may change from year to year, but the message is still the same.

1.  Do everything you can to make sure that released fish have the best chances of survival.
2.  Make sure that your catch complies with all applicable rules.  When in doubt, ask.

And lets not forget the most important part of all - HAVE FUN.

1999 Review

1999 is history. A strange year, to say the least, but what would  you expect from the last season of the century?

 In the striped bass department, we weighed at least 16 fish over  30 pounds, but it should be noted that almost all of them were  recorded during a couple of wild weeks in the fall. In fact, depite many fishermen claiming this past fall run to be the "worst in  decades," our October bass tally indicated one of the best  months in the club’s history with a couple of 32 pounders that  failed to make the interclub cut. To be sure, most of 1999,  including the much anticipated spring run, was a bust – unless you were one of the few fishing chunks in the Western Sound.  Overall, Mike Arma’s 39 ½ takes top honors in the club, followed by Manny Moreno and Jorge Labrada, each with a 38. All of the top bass fell to live eels. Though we don’t give out any special awards, it’s interesting to note that the top fish on an artificial was Mitch Sarro’s 35, on a darter, followed by Scott Hayes’ 32, also on a darter - both fish were caught on the same night.  Paul Bocchino deserves special mention, with a 32 on a hellcat back in May. Fly guy Anthony Lombardo checked in with an 18 pound bass in early November, which edged out John Papciak’s 15 ½ pound October bass.

As the spring bass run fizzled, a surprising run of weakfish helped fill the bass void in June. You could tell that spring bass fishing was not up to par, as many of the open beach and jetty aficionados (club members and non-members alike) were abandoning their traditional spring haunts, and were retrofitting their outfits in hopes of a tiderunner. Sib Paci’s 8 lb weakie, taken back in May on a lead head, held up as the club’s best yellowfin of ’99. John Papciak’s 7 lb 13 oz weakfish in August on a yozuri took second, and Anthony Lombardo’s 7 lb. weakfish on a fly took third.

Bluefishing was also down for the club, as many of the traditional Farragut chopper grounds failed to produce for the first time in almost a decade. Jan Dijkstra’s 16 ¼ pound blue on a chunk taken back in the early spring held up as the largest fish in the club. Paul Bocchino took second with a 14 lb Jones beach chopper, followed by Mike Wilson with a 12. Anthony Lombardo nailed an 8 lb. blue on a fly. John Papciak and Dr. Mike Arma each had nice blues on the fly during one spectacular night at Shagwong, but neither weighed their fish – tough luck guys.

Overall, club participation, in terms of members entering fish for the contests, continued to slip, but participation remained strong when measured by the numbers of familair faces on the beaches - most members still made it out to fish the beaches on a semi-regular basis. During the fall, it was not uncommon to see 15-20 members during the course of a weekend at Montauk.

In terms of the New York Surf Fishing Contest, we finished third in the main event, which includes all species, but first for the most striped bass points.  Whatever the case, those fish not weighed and/or not entered during the spring and summer could have made a big difference. We took second place in the ‘Out-of-State’ bass category. Sib’s weakfish took second in the Interclub weakfish category, and Lombardo’s weak, bass and blue gave him a clean sweep of the fly categories.

In other events, club member Bob Jones took the wetsuit division with a 34 pound bass in the Montauk Locals tournament. Bob won the overall contest in 1998, but a rule change officially separated the wetsuit crowd from the wader crowd. Scott Hayes took third in the Montauk Surf Classic with a 28.

On the fisheries conservation front, 1999 marked an interesting turning point in the striped bass fishery. In 1999, the Striped Bass Technical Committee officially recognized stripers as being overfished, and steps will need to be taken in 2000 to correct the problem. Weakfish and bluefish are still technically overfished. The key is to keep conservation measures in place, rather than cave in to special interests and open things up before the stocks have more fully recovered. You would think we would all be smarter by now. It didn’t take very long for the “recovering” striped bass to end up back on the “overfished” list.

The Changing Tides
Computers and Fish

It’s hard to believe, but the Farragut Striper Club web page is now almost five years in the making.  From an historical perspective, this web site easily qualifies as one of the very first of its kind.  It all started back in 1995, when a friend introduced me to the “web” by installing a browser called MOSAIC on my computer.

There was something to look at, even back then.  But what did I want to learn more about? Fishing!

I remember my first searches for fishing related sites.  Up popped pages like  Reel-time.com and Noreast.com, innovative sites that are no doubt thriving today.  A business associate joked about setting up a surf fishing web page for me, but I took him up on it.  About one week was all that was required to get the Farragut Striper Club up and running.  In no time, we had visitors day and night.  Some were surfcasters from Long Island, some were freshwater striped bass fishermen.  Some visitors, quite frankly, were probably searching for ‘strippers,’ and were disappointed to find pictures of middle-aged guys holding fish!

It seems like so long ago, but it wasn’t.  I guess the speed by which the public has integrated this new technology into the mainstream tends to distort our perception of time.  As of this writing, I couldn’t even begin to list all the fishing related sites worth a visit.

Today, the amount of information, fishing information, available online is staggering.   Lots of junk, to be sure, but if you are industrious and know how to search, you’ll find some very good information.  Some web sites now permit the laziest couch potato to keep up with the daily scuttlebutt on a specific beach - without ever having to leave the house!

This is only the beginning.

Some sites now sport a “surf cam,” where a video camera keeps a live watch at convenient locations.  After viewing the beach from the comfort of his own desk, fellow club member Manny, sent me an email:

"Suppose I’m at work and I see some fish breaking... what do I do??? "

"Start feeling very ill," I responded.

We joked that that I could write a program to monitor these images, looking for what might be breaking fish.  I could then bounce a message off a satellite to a Skytel pager:

"Better get your butt down to Gilgo Beach right away, looks like fish blitzing..."

Sounds silly and far fetched until you realize that the technology is already there. Setting up such a thing would be almost trivial.

Good or Bad?  Who am I to say?

On one hand, the very nature of surfcasting, the primitive nature of the sport, and the seclusion, is now even more in jeopardy. On the other hand, this new technology fills a need.  Its nice to be able to browse NOAA forecasts, then check current conditions at a number of different observation buoys before making a decision on where to go.  We can’t have it both ways!.

Bamboo gave way to fiberglass, fiberglass to graphite…linen to mono, and now to the superbraids…CBs and cell phones…4x4 vehicles and spinning reels, each has contributed to the evolution of the sport.   Now it’s the internet’s turn.

Another interesting trend concerns content, or the type of information that is being made available.

In the beginning, the ’net was the information backbone for sharing academic research.  What we are now seeing is the commercialization of this technology.

And so go the fishing pages.

To put it more bluntly, it seems that now everyone has something to sell.

Which kind of brings us back, full circle, to the topic of the Farragut Striper Club Web Site.

When the idea of setting up a web site was first circulated in the club,  the least technologically inclined offered the best insight.

“What is the ultimate purpose of having a club web site?” they asked.  “What is our message…what are we trying to say.”

For the last five years we’ve been trying to answer just that.

As time permits, this page will continue to evolve.  Club members are always encouraged to contribute to this page.  Other surfcasters are invited to visit, to see what the club is about, or to maybe learn something new. There are no ads, and there is nothing for sale. The ideas and information on this page are free.

Looking back at club's overall largest of species winners

 

 

Farragut Photo Scrapbook
New Photos!

 

Big Fish! (50 pounds and over unless noted)
Lief’s big fish!
Manny’s big fish!
Manny’s udder big fish!
Vito’s big fish! 49+lbs
Jan shows us what an 18 pound chopper looks like

 

2004

Dave H April 

John E June

Farragut Junior Angler Chris M (Paulbo's nephew, ) June

 

2003

Western Sound Mike Martin Mike April

Tom A  May

Tom A  May

Paulbo May

JohnE May

Dave June  

John P June

Dave July  

Mike W Sept  

Paulbo Sept  

Dave Oct '

Frank B Oct  

John E's Son Andrew Oct  

John P Nov  

Paul and Frank B End of Season Last Cast  

 

2002

Dave April

Mike, Tom, Paulbo Littleneck Bay April

Paulbo July

Tom A, August

Frank B, September 

Nick S, October  

Vito,      Frank B,           John P October

Farragut Northeaster Party October 

Dave South Shore

Mike W. South Shore

 

 

2000 / 2001

Tom A., Jones beach 2001

2001 Dominic hooked    Fred Hooked up and Vito  

Patriotic Farragut Members 9/2001

Farragut Crew Montauk 2001  and number two

Rock Hopping pictures by Tom A   and number two

Mike doing things right at Cedar 2001

Tom A, Montauk 2001

Paulbo, Montauk 2001

Scott 1 2

Dominic 

1990's

Dr Mike and John at the North Side of Montauk
Scott on the South Side
A wetsuiter's perspective
Another nice morning at Montauk
PaulBo, Montauk 1999
John and Joe in bucktail heaven
Dr Mike with a large striped bass that he estimates to be over forty pounds!
Nantucket Kenny (TinSquid) and Mike - Mentor and Protege
Frank, Manny and Mike... and one memorable night
Tom A (TheKid)
Dr. Mike with a Lilco schoolie.

1980's
George Wade, Cape Cod 1980
PaulBo, Montauk 1987
PaulBo, Weakies

1970's
Cedar Beach 1974
Cape Cod 1976
Cape Cod 1978
Farragut co-founder Artie at weigh-in (1978)

 

Mike's World (party on, excellent)
Surf Bass 1999
Surf Bass 2000
Surf Bass 2000
Surf Blue 2000
Surf Weak 2000
Mike's Lady (Olga) with her 1st surf bass and blue
Bluffs @ Dusk
Fish On!
On The Wong

Surf Bass 2001

Surf 2001 Spring weaks and Surf Fall Weeks  

Surf Bass Montauk

Surf Bass Montauk2

Surf April 2002

Surf May 2002

Surf Sept 2003

Surf July 2004

Surf July 2004

 

Vito's scrapbook

·  Pat Abate (Owner Rivers End Tackle CT) and Jerry Bernard (Farragut).  Nantucket trip, October 1971. Bass between 18 and 26 pounds.

·  Jerry Bernard, Nantucket 1971, bass to 28 pounds.

·  Jerry Bernard, Nantucket 1973, bass to 29 pounds.

·  Farragut Members on first Nantucket trip 1971.  (back L-R)Al Mathews, Howie Moskowitz, Steve Petri, Sr., Charles Wahl, Jr., (front) Warren Urquhart, Vito Orlando, Pat Abate, Jerry Bernard.

·  Vito Orlando, Nantucket 1971, bass of 25 and 21 pounds.

·  Steve Petri, Sr. Nantucket 1971.

·  Jerry Bernard, Nantucket trip 1975.  From Vito’s fishing log from that day:  "Some locals from Nantucket were laughing at the way Jerry was working the pencil popper. On the Island, all the locals would cast with fast retrieve to make it skip on the surface. Jerry was a master at the pencil popper, he would pulsate the rod, to give the lure that slow side to side dancing motion. The locals asked me and Steve Petri if Jerry would mind some constructive criticism. Both Steve and I just smiled and told the locals that nobody worked a pencil popper better than Jerry. “But he won’t get anything the way he is working that plug,” they said “only exercise.” Well, it was 2 pm in the afternoon, dead calm, as you can see in the picture. Then there is this huge splash right next to the plug.  After a long fight, Jerry beaches a 44-pound bass. I turn to the locals, who are now standing around wide-eyed, “Some exercise program, huh.” The next day when we arrived at Great Point all the locals were trying to work the pencil popper the way Jerry had, but to no avail."

·  Vito Orlando at Seaside Park, NJ.  Vito says he got it on a darter using 10-lb test line (just kiddin’ this mammal washed up after a very strong Nor’easter.)