NorwalkIslandsFishing is written by me, James Hollyday III. I have been saltwater fishing the Sound and the surrounding estuaries since I was in the single digits. After graduating college, my casual hobby turned into an obsession, and I bought my first boat shortly thereafter in 2012. Since then, I have been fishing the Sound by boat, with a focus on the Norwalk Islands, with fervor. I also spent six years as a deckhand and tour guide in the Seaport boat educating folks on the history of the island chain and wildlife.
If you can’t tell, I really like to focus my fishing efforts on this Island chain.
The Norwalk Islands are one-of-a kind because of its varied topography that results in a phenomenal, yet difficult, fishing structure. This is an area that has literally every type of structure present in the northeast. Ice-age glaciers 18,000 year ago formed deep canyons rising from 100 feet to 20 feet of water, countless sandbars and shallow rips, boulder fields, and varied bottom composition from gravel to white sand flats surrounding the 13 islands. That doesn’t count the man made structure from mooring fields, wrecks, docks, oyster beds, navigational aids, and dredged channels. It would take a lifetime to learn all the spots in this relatively confined area. The bottom line is that the Islands are densely populated with structure that holds fish, all season long. I have just scratched the surface of figuring out this area, and I like to write about it. It also helps that this is where I grew up and learned to fish saltwater, with help from a few mentors I’ve had along the way.
