|
Very Nice 22 foot Bay Rider was my Water Whip for the Day... Thanks Capt Tyler Thomas |
|
Ready to SHOCK and AWE the Local King Mackerel Population |
|
Joe A watched 200+ ysrds of 20# mono "melt" of his spool in seconds.... |
|
Birthday Joe collected a NC Citation False Albacore |
Well, it was better than sitting this one out! With the
Top Water Boat in Intensive Care, Capt Tyler gave me the keys to his nearly new
22 ft Bay Rider and Joe Alley and I took his friend "the other Joe" fishing for his birthday.... We started off by catching
15 dozen Menhaden for
live bait and we quickly took off for the
Mackerel Grounds..... As we approached
King Mackerel Country, we ran up on a
very very active school of frenzied
Spanish Mackerel....
Casting was good.
Too good. In fact, we were bit off twice when the sharp-eyed
Mackerel hit the
uni-knot where my
shock leader was attached..... This ate up alot of valuable time.... Re-tying
leaders and
stingsilvers....
The frenzy ended quickly and we only had 2 Spanish Mackerel to show for our efforts... Made me wish we hadn't left the dock at 9am..... Those fish were probably ablaze at 6am and we only caught the last 10 minutes.... Anyway, we went
King Mackerel fishing....
That was okay, except one thing was missing..... The King Mackerel! One time I really got fooled! We had a
double strike...... Screamers.... Reel Dumpers....... One fish headed north, the other headed south. It was a dilemma..... I was willing to bet my ass that we had a double header of
30+ pound Kings hooked up..... I was glowing. 15 stressful minutes later, Joe A had color! Here we go,
but something was wrong. This fish was bulldogging downward and in a tight circle. Unreal. I couldn't believe it when a
33" False Albacore popped up.
DAMMIT....... So a couple minutes later Birthday Joe reeled up his
35" False Albacore. This one had
350 yds off the spool at one point.... In my mind, this was a
45+ pound King.....
Not just No, but HELL NO...... Sitting dead in the water and lamenting my "bad luck" my anglers were very happy though.... Neither of them had experienced this kind of fight from this kind of fish...... The next 20 minutes was a
"Shark Frenzy".....
4 Sharpnose Sharks and
1 Blacktip Shark. Enough already. The guys were happy though, weird.... Then I ran east.
Way east. All the way to
Shark Island. Here we found the missing
Bluefish. Plenty of them from
1-3 lbs each. Not quite every
cast, but still it was great action on
stingsilvers.. I saw
2 Crevalle Jacks crash my
lure. Somehow they both missed. I saw the
jumbo Blue Runners once and we didn't catch one of them either.... The
Shoals were alive with
big Blacktips too. The
western edge was teeming. We passed them up for some fish dinners though....
All in all it was a good day. Thanks Tyler. Thanks Joe and Joe...
Total Catch for the Day: 2 False Albacore at 15 and 17 lbs, 25 Bluefish from 1-3 lbs, 2 Spanish Mackerel at 2 lbs, 4 Sharpnose Sharks from 6-8 lbs, and
1 Blacktip Shark
No comments:
Post a Comment