Today we had the Rich Comly charter aboard for their yearly "fluke" trip. Rich, his wife Toni, and nephew Scott made up the crew without the rest of the usual cast.
For a change of pace, I decided to try some of my spots to the south of the inlet today in hopes we could scrape up some keepers. My deckhand Kenny pulled a beautiful 10.6# out of some rough bottom down there yesterday, so it was worth a crack.
We got outside, there wasn't a puff of breeze however there was a light SE current that pushed us along. Our first drop yielded zero bites, our second just a couple of short seabass, then subsequent drops yielded pretty much nothing. We did find a small patch of shorts, but even that was painfully slow. I decided to take a little gamble and run further south to fish a couple drops off Lavalette/Ortley out in deep water -- again, no bites.
By noon time, we still had no drift, so we decided it was best to switch over to bottom fishing. We pretty much hopped around from rockpile to rockpile, just picking a few keepers and loads of shorts.
The last drop however, was lock and load with some real nice keepers to 3+ lbs coming up, as well as numerous shorts -- we had quite a few double headers as well. Right on top of the piece in 52' of water, on the second drift, Rich even nailed a nice codfish + seabass double header, and Toni also bagged a nice keeper blackfish.
To sum it up, we fluked for 4.5 hours, and caught about 6 shorts. In the remaining 3 hours, we boated well over 75 seabass, keeping ~25-30 to 3#, as well as Rich's cod and Toni's tog.
Fluking was simply horrible, while bottom fishing, as it has done all summer long, picked up the slack quite nicely. Catching codfish in 52' of water in mid August is also bizarre, however it really shows how that stock is rebounding in our area. Rich, Toni and crew will be back in November for the bass - they are a great crew and are a blast to fish with!!!
