We initially had a seabass marathon scheduled for today but with the forecast for a hard SW or S wind I decided to change plans yesterday, and of course gave the 6 anglers on board an option to back out if they didn't want to fluke fish; we wound upw ith 5 of the 6 guys and left the dock this morning with "The Legend" Limestone Larry, Chris "OD", Coach Dave, Tommy and George K.
Ran south to fish the deep rough stuff. First drift we had a quick 3 shorts, but after running back over that "patch" we found nothing. Made a few shifts, found a couple of ling, a couple of nice 2# seabass, and a few short fluke. By 930 the current started screaming out of the S offshore, so it was time to make a decision on making a big move or a little move.
I opted to try in on the beach on some spots we fished quite a few years ago when we had more liberal size limits and the move paid off. Making several drifts in 35-45' of water, we had a very steady pick of fluke, mostly shorts, but enough keepers to keep it interesting. We worked this patch and area until around 1 PM, when we had picked 10 keepers to 21" out of it plus countless shorts, and quite a few of those ocean county clearnose skates
@ 1PM the SE wind kicked in, the drift changed, and things slowed down. We made a move further S and had more life on another old spot where we picked a couple more keepers plus many more shorts.
We also had a small school of VERY FAST moving bonito flying through the crystal clear water - the 12" long variety that grill up real nice. Unfortunately we didn't get a jig in the water till they were long gone.
Overall a good day with a great crew - of course the keeping could've been better but the guys easily boated 20+ fluke each. We easily boated 150 fluke, if not more. George kept count, and said he had 42 by himself including a couple double headers. We wound up with 12 keepers to 21", 2 nice seabass, 2 ling, and a few taylor sized blues. Larry was HH (tied with me!) with 3, and the other guys went down from there and OD had the "big" fish @ 21".
