A very long and tiring weekend finally over. Started out with only 4 hours of sleep before work friday night, worked my shift, and we ran around getting food, bait, launch permit, etc...finally got on the water in my buddies boat, and we trolled a while....got nothing. He called up his buddy who is also doing this bluefish tourney, and he told us where he is, and how they were doing, so we swung by his boat and they asked for a scale to weigh the fish they caught. Because of too many problems with cheap lip-gripper/scale and cheap scales that I had , we bought the electric scale which read out everything pretty close accurate. Their fish was 10 lbs, and we asked if they wouldn't mind if we anchored and fished next to them....no problem. I chummed the 4 porgies I caught the day before at the break wall in NHH, another buddy at work gave us a few mack's and bunkers to chunk fish, and I rigged up the poles and we started to really fish. It was like clockwork on the first bite, to the first fish landed, and I was hooking up big. I never got measurements, but they were larger than what I was catching in the kayak, I landed about 10 nice fish from 9-12 lbs, lost a lot of missed hook-ups, and broke off a few times, my buddies with me and on the other boat were doing pretty good, one got a fish over 12lbs....but wasn't enough to place or even worry about weighing in.
The black flies were literally killing us...so bad that we gave up that spot and went back in to get some bug spray and try to get back out there before the sun went down...since we forgot a spotlight, and we had to load up the boat on the trailer and get to work, just to go back the next morning. I got about a half hour of sleep, showered at work, worked, and then shot back to the boat after re-fueling it and launching. Today the sound was nothing but 3-6 foot rollers from the housy to the breakwater, a little less in the open spots... it just made the trip a little wet coming and going. I landed the first fish again, 10 pound chomper, got a few in the 11's, and had two really large one's that might have brought in some money...but one jumped off the hook right at the boat, and the other one went too close to the prop and cut the line. I do know that my uglystick was bending over as advertised...and it held up. It was just insane, so many fish, so many bites...and sooooo many lost rigs. It didn't dawn on me that the throat of a bluefish goes pretty deep, and the 12" leader's added to the steel wired hooks were not breaking at all, but the cable got beat up bad after a big fish. One buddy had line failure, clasp failure, and then his reel started to skip on every other crank. And another guy with us had an old penn real from the 60's with 20 year old line...surprisingly it never broke, but I was worried if he got a really large one...it wasn't worth it to snap off at the wrong time...so we rigged him up with some braid the next morning.
well, didn't take as many pic's as I should have, but actually got my buddy to take a few of the large ones that got gut-hooked...sorry.
The black flies were literally killing us...so bad that we gave up that spot and went back in to get some bug spray and try to get back out there before the sun went down...since we forgot a spotlight, and we had to load up the boat on the trailer and get to work, just to go back the next morning. I got about a half hour of sleep, showered at work, worked, and then shot back to the boat after re-fueling it and launching. Today the sound was nothing but 3-6 foot rollers from the housy to the breakwater, a little less in the open spots... it just made the trip a little wet coming and going. I landed the first fish again, 10 pound chomper, got a few in the 11's, and had two really large one's that might have brought in some money...but one jumped off the hook right at the boat, and the other one went too close to the prop and cut the line. I do know that my uglystick was bending over as advertised...and it held up. It was just insane, so many fish, so many bites...and sooooo many lost rigs. It didn't dawn on me that the throat of a bluefish goes pretty deep, and the 12" leader's added to the steel wired hooks were not breaking at all, but the cable got beat up bad after a big fish. One buddy had line failure, clasp failure, and then his reel started to skip on every other crank. And another guy with us had an old penn real from the 60's with 20 year old line...surprisingly it never broke, but I was worried if he got a really large one...it wasn't worth it to snap off at the wrong time...so we rigged him up with some braid the next morning.
well, didn't take as many pic's as I should have, but actually got my buddy to take a few of the large ones that got gut-hooked...sorry.
