Open boat trip today with Limestone Larry, Bill the 5th, Brian A, Jeff "Grateful Dad", his son Andrew, and Bud. With the strong NW winds I decided our best bet was to run up the beach and fish the hard stuff between Elberon and the Hook since we would be a little bit more on the inside up there than we would be closer to home.
First few drops were on some rubble and we picked at some jumbo porgies and short seabass. We even had a gold finch land right on Andrew's shoulder - the little guy hung out w/ us for a while and then took off. Bill, our resident bird watcher, ID'd the little guy.
After slowly picking away, we made a move south to fish some more rocks, and got into a steady pick of jumbo porgies as well as a few seabass. I decided to drop a crab in, and quickly put a keeper tog in the boat -- A few of the guys then decided to drop some crabs in, and were immediately rewarded with keeper tog. For about an hour, we had a very good pick of mostly keeper tog coming over the rails - I fished for about 35 minutes and put 8 over 14" in the boat. We were able to cull the tog out of the livewell, one after another, keeping our boat limit of 8. We easily boated 30 keepers until we ran out of crabs -- most of the tog were 16-20", and we had very few shorts.
Jeff and Bud stuck with the porgies, and continued to catch well while the tog bit. Once that bite dropped off, we made a few more drops further south and put a few nice seabass in the box.
We called it a day just after 2 with ~60 keeper porgies in the box, (maybe half were "jumbos") topped by a couple of 3#ers; We also boated ~30 keeper tog, keeping only our boat limit of 8 fish topped by a nice 5#er which I think was taken by Bill, and we also had 6 keeper seabass to 2#. A couple of out of season keeper fluke were also released, and Bud caught a 12# gator blue on a hi-lo rig.
This was another terrific day of bottom fishing - Andrew even got to catch his first ever blackfish (I think he wound up with 4) - Congrats man!! ... A lot of laughs, ball-busting, and some good eats (pickled eggs and smoked tuna were great Jeff!!) made it even better! Thanks for coming down guys!!
