I joined Capt's. Frank & Jerry and FOF regular Jimmy for a day of fun fishing.
Started off on the Bar. First 45 minutes we went 4 for 6 on bass. 2 were keepers at 29"s with the others in ranging from 26-27.99"s. Appeared as if we would get a good bite going, however the bite completely shut off once the tide started moving.
The decision was made to go bottom fishing. On the ride out we came across a large concentration of working birds east of the 2S. Had some huge splashes on top but what really caught our attention was the enormous amount of bait & fish that lit up the machine. We deployed 2 rods rigged with umbrella rigs. At this point we pretty much had the fish to ourselves but that didn't last long. Before the fleet got to bad we were able to catch another 6 bass (all 26-27.99"s and 3 gator blues. When the boat was put out of gear to fight the fish I casted out a jig but the only thing I was able to jig up was a sea robin. It started to get crazy with boats running across our spread and running through the fish. We decided to get out of there before anything bad occurred. As a side note we didn't see any others (jiggers or trollers) hook-up .
We proceded to head offshore, ending up inshore of Scotland. At first we had a slow pick of small sea bass and blackfish. We slowly put a few keeper sea bass in the bucket. 3 of us were using crabs and only Jimmy was using clam. A slow but steady blackfish bite started to build on crabs. By the time we decided to head a little further offshore we had our 4 man limit of tog in the boat to #6 with the other 3 keepers in the #3-5 class. We probably had close to 50 blackfish there between 13-14"s. We made 1 attempt at a deeper drop but other than a small bergall and 1 short sea bass it was lifeless.
