Had Bill P and Ryan H aboard with Michael and I for our special half-day trip. Headed north again and made a drop a little south of where we caught the tog yesterday - had no life whatsoever and zero bites, so we headed up to where we had the action yesterday.
Once we got there and got the boat positioned, it took a few minutes but the bites started coming at a steady pace again. It seemed some of blackfish were smaller today, but we still had a healthy mix of quality fish coming in the boat. Again, a lot of 16-19" fish, with a couple of 4-6#ers coming in topped by Bill's best fish of the day which was around 6#. I was lucky enough to literally catch a piece of real estate! (see the pics below)
The 4 of us blew threw 7 dozen green crabs, boating ~50 tog, with at least half being over 14", if not more than that. As we were running out, the bite again got real good and we had a few nice fish right at the end. We kept our 4 which were all around 18".
Once we ran out of crabs, we put hi-lo's on and fished for porgies and seabass for about 40 minutes, putting 10 nice porgies in the box (only a few jumbos today) and 5 chunky seabass, while catching some short seabass and porgies as well. Ryan also boated another out of season fluke.
Another good trip with lots of bites and lots of action. Bill was on fire, easily boating 20 tog himself - the guy couldn't keep his bait on the bottom without getting slammed!
*On a sidenote, this is the first time I've fished on 9/11 since 2000. I was in the classroom in 01' when everything went down, but today was eerily similar as we had bluebird skies and coolish temps. We had fantastic visibility today, and we could see downtown Manhattan without a problem; you can't help but think back to what occurred 9 years ago today. The events of 9/11 were a horrible thing which should NEVER be forgotten, and the lives lost on that tragic day should also not be forgotten.
