Sorry for the late reports guys. Here are the reports going back to Saturday, starting with the most recent:
10/11: Jim Mulvey chartered the boat today with his buddies Jack, Chris, Rich, and Mark and the charter was filled by Tom "Lefteye" K. Jim's goal was to catch as many species of desirable fish as we could in the day.
Left the dock around 7 - the crew opted to bypass the possibility of an early morning striper bite (and we didn't want to take a bass into the EEZ!) up north so we shot out to the deep to hit a wreck in 220' for cod and ling. Jim dropped down a jig as we were setting up - and banged a nice 7# cod on the first pass. Once we got the anchor in, we worked the wreck over. Slow pick of ling, and a few more cod came up - 3 of which were on the jig and I took one on a whole clam.
After that, our next move was to look for some bluefin and/or mahi around the pots. We threw some bait at a few pots, threw the jigs - but came up completely empty as we only saw a few small jacks or pilot fish follow the jigs/bait. The water was that sick green color, as we didn't really see much life out there.. We then made a quick stop as we moved inshore for seabass, and picked away at a few in about 90'. We then switched over to jigs, and worked an area about a mile off where we spotted some birds and had good marks, but we came up empty. Did get a nice big gator though..
We got inshore around noon time, and we had a few more species to target/catch - so our Next move was to work back north to target porgies and tog. First few drops were a slow pick of porgies with the occasional seabass and lots of bergalls. Jim finally nailed a nice 4# tog on a rockpile. We then shifted inshore, and got into a very steady pick, at times drop and reel kinda fishing with the scup. We boated a load of them, only keeping the bigger ones. No more tog for us though. Current was ripping - that could've had something to do with the lack of tog bites.
Our last drop was further south, as we put the jigs back on and found the motherlode of weakfish - great readings, some almost top to bottom, and in 45 minutes we easily boated 50+, only 3 went in the box though. Most of them were in that 10-12" range.
Overall, we had a terrific day. For the day, we definitely accomplished Jim's goal - we boated cod, ling, bluefish, weakfish, (1) blowfish, seabass, tog, porgies, and fluke. At the end of the day, we had 4 keeper cod, 3 keeper weakfish, 1 keeper tog, ~50 porgies, and about a half dozen seabass & ling, and 1 gorilla blue in the box. I wish we could've topped the box off with a bass, but we unfortunately came up empty with that. Great crew - fantastic day on the water, ya just can't beat it!!!
10/10: Had Tim Segada charter the boat today with his buddies Chris and Jim, and their kids Max, Ben, and Molly. The game plan was to find something to jig, then take the kids up north to do some porgy fishing. We broke the inlet at 7 and found a little sloppy confused ocean, but found some birds and bait not too far away, but couldn't connect. Worked our way north, and jigged on some reads and picked at weakfish and some small blues.
At around 10 AM we went up a little further and switched over to porgy fishing. Hard current got us set up nice on the pieces, and at first we had a slowish pick of mixed sized porgies, and a few seabass. A quick move got us into a nice pick, but that tailed off once the SW breeze started blowing. A few more moves, slow fishing, then we moved a bit further south and got into a real good bite of nice sized scup - several double headers and some real nice fish topped by a couple in the 2# range. Also had some nice seabass.
Called it a day just before 2 - easily boated ~75 porgies, only keeping the no-doubters which put around 50 in the box; we also had about a half dozen keeper seabass. No keeper tog today. Very good day - the kids had a BLAST and caught fish most of the day. Terrific crew, we will be seeing them again next year! Thanks for coming down guys!
10/9: Open boat trip today with Duffman, Mike, Socks, Barry, Sal, and Evan. We initially made a few attempts at jigging some bluefish while we worked our way south, but the bluefish were moving real fast and we simply couldn't keep up with them. We then made several drops on some rockpiles to the S of our inlet. Some held fish, some others didn't. Mostly mixed size seabass, but some drops were loaded with short and a handful of keeper tog. We continued working our way south, where we found a little better bite with seabass and some real nice porgies.
At around 1 I got a call about some fish on top in on the beach, so we gave it a look - more gators however we did hear of a few albies in there as well.We went back to bottom fishing to finish up the day, and picked a few more porgies and seabass.
Made about 15 drops for the day - wound up with ~30-40 fish in the box; an even mix of porgies and seabass as well as 3 nice keeper tog. At best we had a very slow pick all day, but we did come home w/ some fish
