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Had Bill Stabile, Brian "IBS" McCutcheon, Bryan Turci and his buddy Glenn aboard for a FTYP trip today.
Had every intention of running all the way up the beach, but once we made our way out of the inlet we were greeted by a stiff SSW breeze that was pushing 15 steady, so we stayed closer to home, and still got beat up a bit in 3-5's.
Pretty much started out a few miles to the NE, and got into some OK action to start off with some shorts, a couple of keepers, and some seabass adding to the catch. After roughly the third drift, that entire area dried up so we made a shift to the east, and Brian got a beautiful 6# fish on his homemade bucktail and bucktailing stick - but that was it with the exception of some 7-8# bluefish smashing our rigs on the way up.
We then ran a bit south, caught a couple more shorts, and then ran back to roughly where we started and picked away, albeit very slowly, a bit more. Brian added another 5.5# fish to his credit, and Bryan T added a frisky albie that was about 8# on his bucktail, working it on the bottom - definitely a first seeing an albie take a jig right off the bottom. By 2PM, the WSW was screaming a steady 20
At that point, the bite would be best described as a painfully slow pick, so we ran inshore and finished up in the river just to get some action and bend rods and subsequently added a bunch of shorts on some lighter tackle.
Fishing outside today was simply horrible, we had ~25 fish, only 4 keepers to 6#, plus about a bunch seabass (Bryan T nailed a nice 2#) with only 3 keepers, 3 racer bluefish, and the 1 albacore. In the river, we boated another 25 or so shorts with zero keepers.
Overall a very slow day, but we had a great time and "IBS" had us rolling all day especially with his "retreat" into the cabin of death
Oh, and another thing - NOAA, windguru, Buoyweather, and every other forecast completely all had one thing in common today (for once): THEY ALL BLEW THE FORECAST horribly! LOL
