Alex Villani may be the most knowledgeable commercial fisherman working in our local waters, and as the mainstay of Blue Moon Fish, he is undoubtedly the best known and best loved fishermen in New York. Alex has fished off Long Island for 40 years, first as a bayman, then as a net fisherman on the open ocean. He has brought his catch directly to countless thousands of New Yorkers since 1988 through the Greenmarket system. His wife and partner, Stephanie Villani, shares marketing duties with Alex and runs the extensive fish-smoking operation that supplies thousands of pounds of smoked fish to Blue Moon’s inventory throughout the year. They have a young daughter who gets to eat a lot of very fresh fish.

The purpose of this article is to orient New Yorkers to “the lay of the land” (sorry) as it applies to the food fish and mollusks of our closest ocean waters. Of course, seafood comes to the City’s markets and consumers from all over the world, often from murky sources and uncertainly handled. But the ocean bays and coastal waters of Long Island remain a rich, if somewhat volatile, fishing ground that yields large quantities of the very high quality fish and shellfish, products that can reach New York tables in the freshest possible condition. This is a survey of what our native fishery is currently providing from the perspective of a commercial fisherman who sells fish wholesale to the Fulton Fish Market, sells directly to many well-known restaurants (including Bubby’s), and retails seafood directly to the public. This perspective is unique and authoritative.

Alex and Stephanie actively work with at least 35 distinct species of fish and mollusks in the course of a year. Each one of these is caught, handled and marketed in a way that is different for each creature. The sheer mass of detailed knowledge that Alex Villani possesses about the environments, habits, quirks, and fishing history of each of these, from dogfish to sea robin, is vast and genuinely impressive.

Blue Moon’s calendar begins in March and goes through November. The Villanis do not fish in the depths of winter and spend January and February in the Florida Keys, fishing, perhaps, but not working. Almost every type of fish caught and marketed by Blue Moon has some kind of a season, months when it is tends to be relatively plentiful and/or of better quality, and months when it is relatively scarce and/or of diminished quality as food.

One way to categorize the fish of Blue Moon is to divide them into three groups; the largest of these includes the fish and mollusks that Alex targets specifically for capture, at least some of the time. The second group consists of those fish that simply come up in his net randomly in the course of looking for fish in the first group. A third category is the fish and shellfish that Blue Moon gets from other fishermen and other boats. Typically, these fish are usually caught with fishing lines rather than nets, like yellowfin tuna, or they are taken from the bottom using different sorts of boats and equipment, like clams.

Actually, Alex does use smaller boats and special methods to gather a few kinds of shellfish, including 14-foot long tongs that can scoop up mussels and oysters from shallow waters, and a two-foot wide dredge that is used to collect bay scallops from Peconic Bay.

The drag net, swathed in wig-like padding to protect the webbing, with a load of fish on deck. That’s a dogfish shark near Alex’s feet.

But the great bulk of Blue Moon’s fish are caught using a 55 foot long net that is pulled behind his boat in a U-shape, covering a roughly a 40 foot wide swath of ocean floor to a height about 12 feet from the bottom. Alex can use this rigging in very shallow water, 8 to 10 feet in depth, down to a maximum of 150 feet. The net is weighted down and part of it is always in contact with the ocean floor. Alex’s decision about where to drag the net at any given time is influenced by a dynamic combination of factors and follows from the answers to questions like these:

-What fish is being sought and what is the current regulatory limit on the catch of that fish, in total volume and the minimum size of individual fish?
-What source of food is a particular fish likely to pursue at this time of the year and where is that prey likely to be found?
-What ocean depth currently has water temperatures congenial to this type of fish?
-At what stage in its life cycle is this fish? Is it spawning, migrating?
-What particular haunts or areas are known from his experience to be sites where a particular fish might be found?
-What are other fishermen saying about where it’s been sighted recently?

The fishing area of the Blue Moon is basically the southern part of Long Island Sound, from Rocky Point in the west to Greenport, at the eastern end of the North Fork. Long Island Sound may seem to be a relatively calm body of water, sheltered as it is from the Atlantic by the fish-shaped land mass of Long Island, but Alex Reports that it is in some ways more difficult to work on than the open ocean. The Sound is choppier, with waves that come at two or three second intervals, rather than the four or five seconds separating the larger waves of the open sea.

Mattituck, Blue Moon’s base, is situated on a narrow waist of the North Fork of Long Island, with access to both the Sound and Peconic Bay to the south, making it particularly convenient base for a commercial fisherman of these waters. Peconic Bay is no longer open to “draggers”, net fishing boats rigged like the Blue Moon, but it and Shinnecock Bay along the southern shore, which can be accessed through the Shinnecock Canal, are rich sources of shellfish.

Stephanie at the smoker. Bluefish are on the top shelves, tuna filets are on the bottom shelf.

Fishing is fundamentally a form of hunting, that most ancient practice of taking undomesticated animals for food, and commercial fishing is the only type of hunting that continues to significantly contribute to our supply of food. But fishing differs from other kinds of hunting in that the prey almost always completely hidden from view. The real hunting ground for Alex is not the visible, essentially flat surface of the water, but the ocean floor itself. The vital zones of the ocean floor are its edges, places where the depth of the water abruptly drops. These edges are where “bait fish” find shelter and food, and where most of the types of fish that Blue Moon catches go to look for them. In this part of Long Island Sound, there are a series of edges at different depths that are dense habitats for sea life, including one where depths rapidly fall from 20 feet to 50 feet down and another little cliff close to shore where depths go from 8 to 12 feet. Alex knows these zones intimately, as well as other features of the ocean floor, including caves, holes, rocks and shipwrecks.

An enormous quantity of fish, several tons, can be drawn up in a single lifting of the net to the deck of the Blue Moon. At times, the amount of fish in this net reaches the limit of its capacity, a bladder attached to it inflates, and the net automatically rises to the surface of the water. A couple of times a year a net will get seriously snagged or damaged on rocks or perhaps a shipwreck, or it may get filled with soft bottom mud. Most of these potential accidents can be avoided through the benefit of experience, but Alex says that he is still capable of making a mistake.

Besides the pure calculus of fishing, locating, catching and processing fish, the business of a fisherman today is strongly shaped by very detailed and complex limitations imposed by government agencies. Depending on the type of fish and its range of migration, these rules may be set by New York state, the Federal government or international organizations like ICCAT, which is responsible for managing Atlantic tuna. These regulations apply to virtually every type of commercial fish and may change from year to year, month to month, or even daily, reflecting official assessments of the state of a given fish’s stocks and sustainability. The complexity of these regulations is illustrated by the current “trip limit” set on Tautog (or Blackfish) by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. This reads: ”25 per vessel (except, 10 per vessel when fishing lobster pot gear and more than six lobsters are in possession)”. Alex believes that these regulations, while occasionally mishandled, as was the case with swordfish (more on that below), are an important reason for the rebound of the populations of many types of important fish, including swordfish. Alex participates in an experimental program that allows fishermen to bid for the right to exceed regular quotas capping the harvesting of certain fish, including flounder and sea bass.

With the stark exception of the Great South Bay, Alex sees the quality of local waters and the stocks of important commercial fish generally improving from their conditions twenty years ago. He does, however, tend to believe that our ocean waters are warming, altering the makeup and location of the populations of the fish in the seas near New York City.

The condition of the Great South Bay is the other cautionary note in this assessment. When Alex first started digging shellfish in the early 1970’s, perhaps 5000 “baymen” worked the estuaries of Long Island, the largest number of them on the Great South Bay, which is sheltered by Fire Island. Today, because of runoff from residential development and the effects of insecticides used to suppress the West Nile virus twelve years ago, hardly any baymen work there and its recovery still seems decades away.

Fishing at night. Alex often sets out after midnight and fishes through the morning, sometimes getting the best results of the trip around dawn.

As noted previously, a vital part of Blue Moon’s practice is the smoking of fish. At any given time, Alex and Stephanie may have six or seven thousand pounds of fish frozen in storage for this purpose. This part of the business allows Blue Moon to fully utilize its catch; all but the driest and flakiest fish, such as flounder, can be smoked and brought to the Greenmarkets in Park Slope, Tribeca and Union Square. Two days before each market day (Wednesday and Saturday) the fish are brined, then processed in large, electric smokers for about seven hours, using apple wood that Blue Moon gets from Greenmarket orchard people.

What follows is a survey of every type of fish and mollusk that Blue Moon sells in the course of a year, approximately 35 species in all. Each entry discusses how, when and where a particular fish is caught, its relative importance to Blue Moon and how this may have changed over the years, how the fish is processed for marketing, its level of popularity with different types of customers, and how Alex and Stephanie thinks about it personally from a culinary point of view.

In order to provide some sense of the importance of a particular fish to Blue Moon, the list includes information about the volume of sales for each fish, noting if it is a major player, a moderately important fish, or a rather incidental character in this theater. Minor fish account for less than 1000 pounds of sales per year; moderate sales are 1000 to 5000 pounds, the largest selling fish surpass 5000 pounds per year.

Types of Fish Sold at Market and approximate season

Availability of fish may vary due to weather conditions.

Fillets
Bluefish (April – Nov.)
Blackfish (March – Dec.)
Codfish (Nov. – April)
Flounder (all year)
Fluke (all year)
Herring (Nov. – April)
Mackerel (Boston: Nov. – May, Spanish: July – Sept.)
Mahi Mahi (June – Sept.)
Mako shark (June – Nov.)
Monkfish (Sept. – May)
Scallops (all year)
Scrod (all year)
Shad (March – April)
Shark (dogfish) (June – Oct.)
Skate (all year)
Squid (all year)
Striped Bass (July 1 – Dec. 15)
Swordfish (June – Nov.)
Tilefish (July – Sept.)
Triggerfish (July – Sept.)
Tuna (June – Nov.)
Weakfish (sea trout) (April – Nov.)

Shellfish
Clams (hard shell – all year)
Steamer Clams (summer/fall)
Razor Clams (fall/winter)
Conch (all year if available)
Lobster (all year if available)
Mussels (May – July if available)
Oysters (March – May and Sept. – Dec.)

Whole fish
Bluefish (April – Nov.)
Bonito (July – Sept.)
Butterfish (all year)
Flounder (all year)
Fluke (all year)
Herring (Nov. – April)
Mackerel (Boston: Nov. – May, Spanish: July – Sept.)
Porgies (all year)
Sea Bass (all year)
Sea Robins (all year)
Squid (all year)
Striped Bass (July 1 – Dec. 15)
Tunny (Aug. – Dec.)
Weakfish (April – Nov.)
Whiting (Sept – May)

Other
Flounder Roe (Spring and Fall)
Monkfish Liver (Sept. – May)

Smoked/Pickled Fish
Smoked fish (bluefish, tuna, mackerel (Boston and Spanish), shark (dogfish), monkfish, striped bass, sea robins, whiting (all year, as fish is frozen before it is smoked) Pickled herring (Nov. – March)

Read about all Blue Moon fish here.