This is much more the way winter is supposed to be, windy, cool and rainy. While uncomfortable for some, this sequence of events is nature’s way of getting the marine world ready for another round of growth, development and the natural phenomena that make for the seasons as we know them.

Heavy seas and big waves mean that the waters are being mixed, forcing nutrients up from the depths into the lit world where plankton can make use of them.

Little plankton are the food of bigger plankton, then small fish, and then bigger fish and so on, all the way up to the apex predators such as billfish, tuna and sharks. Without the basics there would not be any of the big things.

The onset of cooler water marks the change of season and is probably a key indicator for the movement of migratory species, although it is by no means the only thing that drives such things. Some species have adapted to the seasonality found here, and these species such as the amberjack, bonita and even blackfin tuna seem to be resident.

Other species such as yellowfin tuna and wahoo also stick around in the winter, although temperatures are getting near the reported limits of their ranges. They may actually come and go with eddies of, or patches of, warm water that drift around in the middle of the ocean.

Meaning, that some days they are here and others they are they are not which might account for their patchiness during our winter.

Too cold and the Island’s coral reefs come under threat. Corals are actually fairly delicate and susceptible to changes in water temperature with something like 61°F being about as low as they can go without being damaged or killed. Although the weather reports may state the daily seawater temperature is something cooler, those samples are taken from inshore waters which are more highly variable that the huge volumes of water found over the reefs and offshore.

In any case, there is also some evidence that water that is too warm is also harmful to coral, so maybe being pretty much at the northern limit for coral growth, the local corals get pretty much the best of both worlds. Maybe a little stress in the winter, but never the 90°F plus that occurs in some places.

Maybe there is another positive side to the cooler the water gets during the winter. That means that as summer approaches, it will take more heat energy from the sun to warm up the surrounding sea. This usually translates into it taking longer to warm up to the roughly 80-degrees mark, which is favourable to hurricanes.

As a rough correlation, cooler summer oceans discourage tropical development. As always there are exceptions, but that is the general picture.

The thing that has an effect is for just how long the sea will be absorbing the sun’s radioactive energy because a surfeit of heat energy is what drives tropical development. The equatorial regions are always warm enough, so it is only when they start to move northward that the water temperature in the subtropical and temperate zones become important.

Long summer days and a lack of clouds blocking out the sun’s insulation means the water is going to warm up. Water holds heat energy well, which is why hurricanes often come in our direction in September and even October.

Another downside to temperature is that cooler water might discourage the early arrival of some of the summer migrant species, notably the blue marlin which is always associated with warm tropical waters even though it has been recorded from some cooler climes.

Probably the important thing to note is that the ocean around the Island will eventually attain a temperature in excess of 80-degrees Fahrenheit at some point during the summer months, which will mean that the summer species will be in attendance.

As a rule of thumb, species such as marlin and certain tunas will only arrive when the water temperature moves into their preferred range. Thus the tournament circuit usually spends autumns in the Caribbean with Venezuela being a choice destination along with the Dominican Republic, then after an early year refit and haul, the action moves to the Bahamas in the early spring, and by May is coming as far north as Bermuda or the Mid-Atlantic states.

June and July here and then head southward where there is more shelter from tropical systems and what should be plenty of fish; high summer (August) in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and then the cycle starts over again.

Unlike those climes to our south, Bermuda experiences the change of seasons associated with the northern hemisphere. The difference is that, in most cases, we miss out on the extremes. It doesn’t freeze in winter, neither does it get ridiculously hot in the summer, unbearable to some as it may seem.

The ocean here also goes through those changes and it is this sequence that has anglers speaking of “fishing season” and the “off-season”. While tournaments and other organised events are limited to the “season”, there are occasions in the “off-season” when some of the year round resident species, such as wahoo and amberjack, make it possible for the more intrepid angler to experience some rather welcome Tight Lines!