June 22, 2016 — WESTBROOK, Conn. — There’s a joke among Connecticut anglers that the first thing you really need for a Long Island Sound fishing trip is a lawyer: Catching the wrong fish at the wrong time in the wrong waters could land you in a tangle of legal trouble.
Let’s say you were fishing in the Sound in early June, believing you were in Connecticut waters where the black bass season began on May 1. If you hooked a good one but had drifted over the mid-Sound state line into New York’s jurisdiction, you’d have been in violation. New York’s black bass season doesn’t start until June 27.
“You move 100 feet this way, and you could be over the line,” Jack Conway Jr., a longtime Connecticut fisherman who has frequently served on state and regional fishing regulatory panels, explained last week.
Conway and his 81-year-old father, Jack Conway Sr., had just returned from a successful black sea bass fishing trip into the Sound with Bill Kokis, owner of Westbrook’s Marshview Marina.