Today I had the pleasure of fishing with Greg and Pat of the Virginia fly-fishers club. As a good friend of mine would say – a prince and princess among men and women.
As far as albacore goes, today was TOUGH. The fish should have been showing with the north winds (and all the bait), and as good as the fishing was last week – it should have been on fire. But, that’s the way fishing goes. There were fish around – small pods and some onsies and twosies – and we got some good shots in the morning and up to lunch time. It was then when we realized why the albie fishing might be a bit slow in the lookout vacinity – drifiting about 50 yds off of the bight in 30 feet of water, we were looking for fish when a massive (aren’t they all?) BLUEFIN TUNA rocketed completely out of the water, making a splash only a volkeswagon beetle being dropped off of a bridge could compare to. A truly amazing site – this happened within 100 feet of my boat. How often do you get to see a BLUEFIN sky?!?!?! Maybe that’s why the albies were sparse – Mr.Bluefin was eating them.
After seeing the bluefin, we headed down the beach and found some small pods of fish busting bait in the breakers off of shack. We drifted a tide line hooking one albie before Greg landed his first albacore on the fly rod! Being that only a few were caught all day among 50 or so boats – Greg was very, very happy. About that time, we also came across a nice knot of 2-3lb speckled trout that Pat and Greg were getting on the fly. I was hooking fish every cast with a grub – the problem was getting the fly down deep enough before the ripping current pulled it away. My buddy, Captain Dean Lamont was about 100 yards away from me and his clients were landing puppy drum on the fly on almost every single cast for several minutes. Awesome!
With some specks in the cooler for dinner, we chased a few more albies and hit a trout hole before calling it a day. PAt and Greg will be back fishing with me on thursday when it will be Pat’s turn to catch an albie and hopefully many, many more than that.
