We had Derial Sanders charter the boat today - along with Derial were his brother John and Derial's grandson Trevor. Steve "Socks" filled in a spot for the trip as well.
Ran off to the east first thing in a sloppy 4' chop coupled with the swell, but got up on the hook and started getting some chum in the water - conditions sort of sucked as the chum was running right up to the bow, but we made due. In the first 5 minutes, Steve hooked something that nearly spooled him twice, took him around the boat, and seemed a bit bigger than an albie or skippie - we had it around 20' away and saw color but the fish came unbuttoned. My only guess was that it was a football bluefin. It took a few minutes after that to get a bite going, but we had some real gator bluefish right in the slick and we started to pick away at them on both jigs and bait for a little while.
After that slowed down, we made a move around 11AM to look for some albies, and with a little wiggle, we got set up on some good reads and again got the hook in and started throwing over some spearing. It only took about 10 minutes - we first had a few bluefish, but the albies took over! Great action as we broke out the light spinning rods, the fish were right in the slick, dashing through as well as up on top. We had mostly had 1-2 on for the rest of the day, and we had a real nice flurry right at the end where we were virtually hand feeding them right behind the boat!
All albies took spearing or tsunami soft plastics.
Great trip -- we boated easily 20 albies, if not a few more, and lost easily that many. We also boated a bunch of bluefish (didn't count!) and busted off quite a few of the big demons as well (10-14#ers). Derial and the guys were great, and they again took part on another memorable trip!! Thanks for coming down guys!!
