Sailed with only 2 this morning with Darren and Don K making up the crew with Kenny and I. I did have a few more guys but a couple switched dates around last minute, and another backed out.
With the crappy forecast I made the decision to stay relatively close. We fished some rocks/wrecks 5-7 miles NE of our inlet initially. We were able to pull a few nice keeper fluke to 4# as well as a few nice seabass, as well as some shorts. By 10AM the sky went black, and a quick look at the radar indicated a nasty storm was headed our way, so we ran south to get out of its path -- crazy lightning, heavy rain, and GUSTY W winds to 40 kts made the ocean a nasty place for a few minutes.
After the squall went through, we got back to flukin'. I decided to hit a few snags S of our inlet in 70-80' of water that I haven't tried yet this year. First drop produced a seabass, a ling, and a couple of shorts. Second drop, just as the S wind started to blow a bit produced a steadyish pick at mostly keeper fluke -- most fish here were over 19" and were topped by the top fish of the day @ 27", taken by Don which weighed just around 8# on my hand scale (the digital wasn't working!!!) as well as a couple in the 3-5# range. We had about 6 good cracks at them before it started cranking... And By 3PM, the S wind really got cranking, and we were having a hard time holding with 8 oz. bucktails, so we called it a day.
Crazy day. Thunderstorms, squalls, some fluke and seabass, and to top it off we even had a 4' brown shark cruising around the boat for a few minutes.
When all was said and done we brought 10 quality keeper fluke to the boat, 5 seabass, 2 ling, and a handful of tailor blues. 3 of the fluke were in the 3-5# range, topped by Don's ~8#er. With the small crew all of us got to fish and everyone put a few keepers in the box - Kenny showed us all how it was done today!! With that said, this wasn't a banner day by any standards, but we had some nice chunky fillets to show for our efforts
