52 Week Season is a project featuring interviews with mid-Atlantic hunting and fishing guides, biologists, and other wildlife experts. The focus of the site is the "sportsman's calendar" and the mindset that you could hunt or fish for some kind of critter in our region pretty much every week week of the year.

From bluegills in June to smallies in July to white marlin in August, below is a rundown of the summer months.

Read the full Interviews here.

JUNE

Key Dates and Environmental Cues

• Early June is the beginning of the warmest 90 days of the year in the Mid-Atlantic

• June 20 — Longest day of the year

Week 14. Largemouth

The best place to catch lunker bass is on farm ponds. There’s a 16-acre lake on the Eastern Shore that holds some real bucketheads. About two-thirds of the lake is surrounded by fields and steadily gets deeper as it pushes up against an earthen dam, and about a third of the lake, the shallower or “up creek” end, fans out into flooded timber. 

By about mid-May, the lake looks healthy, full, and tea colored, and if you catch the lake on the right evening, it can be pancake flat. You can look across it at the corn field and see the fish start to ripple the surface as the sun sets.

The best evenings are right before a thunderstorm. Maybe it’s just an imagined anticipation as you see the front moving across the radar, but meteorologists also suggest the dropping barometric pressure can trigger fish feeding, and the low light surely helps. It all comes together when you strip that popping bug across a glassy surface, and an angry largemouth shatters the surface for it.  

Week 15. Bluegills

When the water hits the 70s and stays there for a week or two, bluegills begin to dig out frisbee-sized nests and spawn. In the dog days of summer when the air is heavy and the days are long, head to pond or lake with some cold beers and the next generation of anglers. The whole region is pock-marked with farm ponds teeming with bluegills that will attack a fly that lands over its nest like a wolf defending its carcass. 

“What most people don’t know about bluegills is if we have a long hot dry summer, bluegills can spawn up to three times in a year,” says Beau Beasley, author of Fly Fishing the Mid-Atlantic. 

Most of the region’s ponds and rivers hold not only bluegills, but a handful of other cousin species, including pumpkinseeds and red-breasted sunfish.

Week 16. Carp

Angus Phillips once joked that the Beaverkill is famous for its Hendrickson hatch, Penns Creek is renowned for the green drake hatch, Henry’s Fork is celebrated for its salmon fly eruption, “and Washington has the mulberry hatch.” Says Phillips: “The mulberry hatch provides Washingtonians their once-annual chance for high-sport angling for one of the least glamorous breeds of aquatic life. Great big ugly carp.” 

Sometimes called the “poor man’s bonefish,” carp can be one of the most challenging fish to catch and are the perfect tonic when the rivers are blown out, bone dry, or otherwise unfishable. 

The “mulberry hatch” hits in early- to mid-June when the red-purple fruit drops. You’ll know it but the sticky carpet on the sidewalks in Georgetown; the carp will know it by that distinctive plop in front of their snout.

Week 17. Yellowfin

It’s all about finding that seam between the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current. A few dozen miles east of Ocean City, Virginia Beach, and Oregon Inlet, the cool, nutrient-rich waters of the Labrador Current sweep south and meet the warm tropical current of the Gulf Stream. Eddies peel off and churn up the canyons off the continental shelf, creating one of the best tuna fisheries in the hemisphere.  

“Late spring into early summer is a really good season for yellowfin,” says Salt Water Sportsman editor Ric Burnley. “The yellowfins will be about 10-15 lbs. in early June, and by July and August, they’ll be 20-30 lbs. … When the word goes out that the yellowfin are in, people drop whatever they're doing and run to get out there. Every parking spot it taken, and you can't find a place to park your truck!” 

Week 18. Cobia

Affectionately or derisively known as the crab-eater depending on who you talk to, cobia show up in mid-summer when the Bay’s waters are at their warmest. Cobia mostly stick to the deeper waters of the lower Bay.

“You have a mass exodus of adult rockfish when the core temp of the bay is 65 and start seeing a big influx of cownose rays and the inward migration of cobia and drum,” says Tyler Nonn of Tidewater Charters. They’ll stay most of the summer and then “start to leave with the first couple of north winds in late August.”

Week 19. Flounder and Seabass

Mid-summer in the back bays of the Delmarva is flounder time. There are perhaps no more popular fish in towns like Ocean City than flounder, mostly because they can test the skills of any level of angler, they are abundant, and they are delicious. Flounder can be caught on everything from a dangling minnow to a lure or fly if the action is right. These flatfish love to lie in wait and ambush unsuspecting bait fish in the shoulder hours around a peak tide. These are true saltwater fish so are found in the lower reaches of the Chesapeake or the Atlantic back bays and will be found in the highest numbers when the large mullet and baitfish come into the creeks in July. Bigger bait will catch the fat flounders, or “doormats” as they’re called around here. 

Week 20. Mahi

Week 21. Smallmouth Bass

Lefty Kreh once declared smallmouth bass, “my favorite freshwater fish.” For a fly-fishing legend who traveled the world from Cuba to Alaska to Borneo, that’s a high honor.

But anyone who has ever floated down the Shenandoah River in late July, tossing poppers to one eager smallie after another, knows exactly what he’s talking about.

You can meander down the valley in a drift boat or canoe or inflatable raft, covering perhaps a mile an hour, and find plenty of bass hiding in the shade under the sycamores. On a good day, you’ll catch dozens, all on topwater. Even if your mind wonders off to the scenery around you – the long-settled farms tucked in between the slopes and the eagles suspended on thermals – a bass whacking your popper will bring you right back. The fishing is interrupted only by a gravel-bar lunch.

The motions feel similar to trout fishing – you’re reading the river and casting behind boulders, along cut-banks, and through tail-outs – but you’re fighting a broad-shoulder bully that’s arguably more combative than its largemouthed cousin.

“At the peak of the heat, there is a ton of insect activity and on the surface -- cicadas, ants, beetles, and damsel flies can fall in the water,” says Virginia guide Matt Miles. “There’s a just a bunch of insects concentrated on the surface -- it's really a great time of year for the topwater flyrodder.” 

Week 22. White Marlin

On the first full week of every August, the epicenter of the sportfishing world descends on Ocean City, Maryland for the White Marlin Open. Thousands of anglers in hundreds of registered boats compete for millions in cash prizes.  The world’s largest billfish tournament also draws thousands of spectators for the weigh-ins each night and generates tens of millions of dollars for Ocean City’s top purveyors of diesel and dark-and-stormies. 

“White marlin is the ultimate game fish,” says Salt Water Sportsman editor Ric Burnley. “You’re trolling with small ballyhoo, and when it whacks it, you need to frantically dump the line and feed the fish -- it's chaos! The captain is chasing him at 6-7 knots, and there’s a big cloud of black smoke, and everyone is yelling!” 

Week 23. Bluefish

If bluefish were the size of sharks, we wouldn't get in the water. In his seminal book Blues, John Hersey refers to a 19th-century U.S. government fisheries report -- hardly a forum for hyperbolic prose -- that describes blues as “a pack of hungry wolves, destroying everything in sight, leaving a trail of fragments of their prey and a stain of blood and oil in the sea.” Biologists Alice Lippson and Robert Lippson, authors of the sober Life in the Chesapeake Bay described their ferocity as “killing for the sake of killing even when they get their fill.” Many a Chesapeake angler has had flies, lures, or bait shredded to pieces. More than a few have also been close to losing a digit getting a hook out.

The bluefish’s Latin name, Pomatomus saltatrix, actually has nothing to do with salt – it means “leaping fish” – but the saltier waters of summer do go hand-in-hand with bluefishing. First off, blues can a wise change of pace when the suffocating waters of summer make it tough for rockfish to survive catch and release. Second, “Bluefish like higher salinity levels than stripers.” wrote Bill May. “Usually, this means well south of the Bay Bridge, especially for larger specimens. But if there’s been a dry summer, they will move north of the bridge.”

Week 24. Tarpon

Some of the best tarpon guides have some of the best accents. Capt. Jack Brady fits the bill, but he doesn't speak with the Caribbean patois or islander Spanglish that so many tarpon anglers are accustomed to. Capt. Brady has the distinct dialect of his native Eastern Shore community of Oyster, Virginia -- or arster, as he says -- where he's lived for over 80 years.  

Most anglers don’t associate the silver king with Virginia, which is understandable. The first tarpon caught in Virginia was bycatch from anglers going for red drum, and Capt. Brady stumbled across his first guiding for sharks. But plenty of fish in the triple digits have been caught off the Eastern Shore since, and the habitat could easily be mistaken for parts of Florida.

Take a boat east out of Oyster, Va., and you’re greeted with nearly 10 miles of saltwater bays, creeks, and marshes that don’t stop until you hit the barrier islands of Cobb, Wreck, or Hog on the Atlantic. The islands once supported villages of waterman but today aren't home to much more than Nature Conservancy outposts and abandoned duck camps.  

It was off Wreck Island that Capt. Jack Brady caught his first tarpon, the same year that Hemingway was fishing with Castro. 

“Over here on the seaside, they get here in June, and stay until two northeast winds come in September,” says Shore angling legend Capt. Brady. “when they disappear, you have no idea where they're going. They're like a ghost!” 

Week 25. Specks

Looking at map of the Chesapeake, Tangier Sound looks like a big chunk of the Eastern Shore disintegrated into the Bay -- which, in a way, it did.  Bounded by a chain of soggy islands to the west and endless expanses of marshes to the east, the sound is underlain by a texture of submerged islands, grass flats, channels, shoals, and in some places, stump fields where groves of hardwoods once stood.  The diversity of water creates some crazy currents, which keep the Sound well-oxygenated and make a pristine habitat for fish.

“The speck fishing in Tangier Sound can be world class. We have the best specks anywhere north of the Carolinas,” says Tangier Sound guide Chris Karwacki. “May can be the month when a nice grade of specks begins to move into the sound. … I like the last week of May and the first week of June.” 

Week 26. Summer Harvests

“When I started working,” says Captain Billy Rice, who began his career on the water in 1965 when he was 10 years old, “oysters were our #1 money maker, followed by striped bass and white perch, and then followed by blue crab. Today it’s the opposite: blue crab are our #1 money makers, followed by stripers and then oysters.” 

From the helm of his 24-foot Chesapeake classic Miss Jill, Rice has seen booms and busts and witnessed long-term changes in the market. He has also helped set the commercial seasons and quotas as chairman of the Tidal Fish Advisory Commission and guided the industry as an officer of the Maryland Waterman’s Association. 

“We would get $10-12 per basket,” says Rice of the old days crabbing. “Now [in 2016] it’s $140 per basket but there’s fewer to go around. Also, the table trade for crabs is really where it’s at these days, and the market now demands big, fat, happy #1’s. We don’t worry too much about competition from other places, because if we can provide the supply, there is a good market demand all year.” 

Rice watches a few factors each year to keep track of the supply side. “There are also a lot of variables that can influence the success of a crabbing year,” says Rice. “Things like a lot of rainfall -- too much rain holds them down the bay and too little rain will send them up -- or an influx of croaker or other prey that might eat up crabs.” 

There’s no better time than Labor Day to crack a few 10 ouncers and stack a pile of fat and happy #1’s. Crisfield, the self-proclaimed Seafood Capital of the World, marks the holiday with its National Hard Crab Derby. Held every Labor Day since the Truman administration, the Derby features events such as a boat docking contest, crab picking contest, Miss Crustacean Pageant, and the main event, the Governor’s Cup blue crab race. 

Across the bay from Crisfield, chef and angler Wade Truong has dialed in on some good shrimping spots, too. “Shrimping in the bay has been phenomenal and it’s only getting better,” says Truong, who runs Elevated Wild, a website for wild fish and game recipes. As a former executive chef, Truong would often find himself down the supply chain from folks like Captain Rice, but he loves going straight to the source too. 

You can find the srhimp in “really shallow stuff in those back finger creeks. You’re out there throwing a cast net for hours,” says Truong. “They aren’t jumbos, more like mediums, but they’re super sweet and super fresh.”

With so many options this time of year, back-yard picnic tables are crowded. Late August is a bountiful time for mid-Atlantic waters. “It’s pretty cool,” says Truong, “to be able to stack a bunch of shrimp, a bunch of crabs, some specks, and some puppy drum, all in the same day.”