Had a 1/2 day charter this morning from 7-11:30 w/ Fred Shaw and his buddy Joe. The plan was to target bass first thing then mix it up with some bottom fishing to finish out the trip.
We ran south, and the first part of the trip was spent chunking and fishing cut heads from fresh bunker on some structure. With bass fishing at a complete standstill for the last week or so, I wasn't expecting much - and, needless to say, we didn't even have a sniff in the 75 minutes or so we tried for the bass.
So, it was off to the reef to do some seabassin'. Tough anchoring conditions, we had to reposition several times on the first drop just to get it right but once we did we had pretty a fair pick of seabass and ling on that first drop. Lots of shorts, but enough keepers to keep it interesting. Also picked a short fluke, and a smallish silver eel off this spot.
At 10:30, we picked up and ran a bit further north to fish some concrete rubble. Much more variety here, as we had more seabass mixed in size, a dinner plate size porgy of 2# on the digital scale, a 15" tog by Joe that unfortunately had to go back, and a few more ling. The biggest seabass of the day came out of this spot, just a shade under 3#.
In 2 1/2 hours of bottom fishing and 2 drops we easily boated 75 + seabass, (and probably 40 of them were over 12") -- with 2 dozen being keeper size; we also had 5 ling, 1 fluke, 1 silver eel, 1 porgy, and 1 15" tog - real smorgasbord!
Overall a good trip for action - bent rods all day long and lots of laughs!
