Had Ed, Jim, Pat Sr and Pat Jr, and Darren aboard for a FTYP trip today. Forecast was iffy, but it looked like we could get the day in as NOAA called for SE 10-15 all day.
Ran up north. First drift, we had immediate action as we boated a bunch of shorts as well as a nice keeper. Second drift, same result. Third drift, the life started to dwindle, and so it went for the rest of the day. Moved all over, picked a couple, but that was it. By 11 the SSE started cranking, but we kept at it. The bite came to a creeping halt by noon time - no more bites, a super fast drift and absolutely nothing in the boat.
We moved down off Long Branch, and picked a couple more fish as well as a couple of seabass, but things really started shutting off. By 120PM, the sky started to darken, winds were really screaming, and a big nasty storm was headed our way so we made the call to head for the barn.
The ride back was pretty interesting as we saw blinding rain, blinding spray from the wind, and building seas. S of Shark River we had solid 6'ers +. I buried the bow about 10 times, and cavetated a few also. We broke the inlet safely at 230. Obviously, NOAA got this one COMPLETELY wrong.
We wound up boating around 30 fluke, about 2/3 of them were caught on the first 2 drifts. Out of the 30, 4 were keepers over 18" with the biggest going around 20". We also had I think 4 keeper seabass.
Very tough day, conditions flat-out sucked and it now doesn't look like we're getting out until the latter portion of the week. This crew was fantastic, even though they got banged up!!! Thanks for coming guys and sticking it out!
