Had designs of catching some nice fluke today with Shay Shay and T-bone. Headed outside specifically targeting fluke for the first time this year and checked some reliable spots. We were well equipped with the right bait. Live Herring, Asian Squid, Killies should do it. Hit the grounds shortly after slack and put some nice drifts across the promised land. Not a flattie was home but the sea bass insisted on inhaling everything we had to offer. Their preference.... short squid/4" chartruese mullet gulp and/or a silver side slapping tails with the gulp. Some decent ones were boxed in this area but the great majority were short. Thought about anchoring.... but the structure in this area can make your worse nightmare seem like a G rated movie. You know... so we did the short drift thing till we got burnt out on to many to count 12" fish.
Ran a tad south along the snake were we had a good day with the Spro's with Donnie and Don Sr of the McGuiver family. The winds were coming strongly out of the E/NE and slid us down the throat of the Rattler. This section produced some nicer fish once again although the drift was too damn fast. 8 and 10 oz just doesn't make for a happy day unless your putting meat on the deck. Heck we had fish but getting the keeps was a chore. We anticipated a handful of fluke but they were not here!
Not sure what to make of it. We saw the fleet all working the SH reef but elected to not play pinball with the crowd. Tommy can you hear me? Tommy? Tommy? No Pinball wizardry for us. Maybe we should have played? Seems like there were a fair amount of decent fish reported for the JCAA. Oh well, you live and die by the decisions you make. We headed toward the beaches and worked our way north. We had a ton of fluke and no other species. Brother Jay (Shay Shay) was in high gear bouncing lead like old times. I think the rust is off. Just need to get him out alot more. T-bone was crankin away. A one point he's dunking the dip net like he's at a carney and has got money on dropping the clown off his chair into the dunk tank. He kept yoking flatties in and could not get his herring on the line quick enough. These things were doing the job. The shame of it is... all of the flatties we caught today were 16-17.5".
As seas continued to churn, we worked the 32ft to 18ft next to the beaches. More shorts. By this time we've put in a good day and motored toward the candle sticks to see what might be lurking. The drift.... I'm fairly certain this one was 2.5 NM produced a bunch more shorts... T-bone kept his groove but Jay and I got colder than a keg locker for a liquor store. At 2:00 we called it a day. We stopped counting fish both sea bass and fluke early on in the trip. At the end of the day we boxed 7 decent seabass and not one keeper fluke.
Lessons learned.
Catching is better than fishing
Keeping is better than catching (I'm determined to improve the ratio)
Polish spare ribs are the bomb
You can clean fish, clean the boat in less than 20 minutes (especially when you tell the wife you'll be home at 4:30 and she say's "I don't think so")
Had a great time with excellent anglers! Till next time.
Here's a real crappy pic of the seabass from my cell phone. The digi camera took a siesta!
