6/4/05
My first saturday off in forever, this morning I went fishing with my buddy Captain Scott Crocker of www.shacklefordcharters.com and my fiance, katie. We thought it would be fun to try for some flounder to see if the bite is picking up. At the dock, I spoke to my neighbor Captain Bobby Edwards of Atlantis Dive Charters – they’ve been seeing flounder (huge ones) stacked up 3 on top of each other 30-50 miles out lately – so it looks like it’s going to be another great year when the water finally warms up!
On the way out, we found some spanish and scattered blues. Once we got to our spot, we watched some huge spadefish swim around under the boat – but our clams and clam chum didn’t produce a strike. Bummer – they’re good to eat! Pretty soon we had small jacks in the slick and caught a few on ultra-light tackle – baby amberjacks, if i’m not mistaken. They weren’t hardtails (blue runners) or barjacks, that’s for sure. For a while, spanish were busting aorund the boat and we managed a few hookups on topwater chuggers.
Within a few minutes, we found the flounder – good numbers of them too. Lots of hook-ups and good fights – most of the fish were between 15 and 18 inches. The only problem was the 4-5′ barracuda (honestly one of the biggest i’ve ever seen) that was hanging out under my lower unit and slicing our fish in half on the way to the surface. It was exciting but also sad to see half a 18″ flounder sink to the bottom. We kept 3 nice flatties for dinner and released a bunch – hopefully the bite will stay steady and i’ll be into them all week. Wednesday all day, Thursday PM, Saturday the 11th, Sunday the 12th are open. The forcast is great!!!
6/5/05
This morning I went fishing with Derek and his wife Dana – targeting flounder. The bite was a little slower than the day before but we did manage a many 13-14inch fish on live bait mixed in with the billions of seabass which we could hardly get our baits. It was a beautiful calm day on the water though!
