Speckled Trout, Tautog, Cod

Saturday I joined Charles and Hunter Southall for a trip to the Elizabeth River. We stood in the rain all day catching the occasional small speckled trout. There was hardly anybody else around. I guess they were being dry somewhere. Capt. Blake Hayden was out in the rain with us and we fished near him some of the time. We saw his charter catch 2 big speckled trout. They were using baits as large as some of the trout we were catching. Then there was Matt. There was one brief time in the afternoon when the rain stopped and sky lightened a bit. That is when a center console pulls up and Hunter says that looks like the boat Matt Rinck has been fishing on ( I think it is Joey Stratton’s boat). Sure enough, Matt gives us a wave. They get the boat positioned and about that time, one ray of sunlight breaks through the clouds and shines down directly on a boat that looks like it has just been washed and waxed. It is one of those fancy boats with all of the high-tech stuff like automatic bilge pumps. We were using a scoop, cut out of a Clorox bottle, to bail out the water in Hunter’s skiff. Looking like a GQ model, Matt strikes his Captain Morgan pose on the bow and proceeds to cast. Within 15 minutes he is bowed up to a big trout. We know it is a big trout because Joey is giving us the “big fish” sign. During the fight, it looks like Matt is posing for some magazine cover. Actually, it would have been a good shot with the spotlight from heaven shining down on him while the rest of the world was under a cloud. Being in a little skiff with pouring rain all day, I did not bring my good camera so I yelled over to them, “quit posing and catch your fish already, I don’t have my camera”. They soon netted a pretty trout that measured at 27.5 inches long. I asked them to take a photo and send it to me. Soon after they released the fish, it started to mist. Joey and Matt left before it started raining again. I looked at Charles and said, “Can you believe this?” Charles said that the next time he saw Matt that he just might walk over and kick him. So Matt, if someone just kicks you at the next Flounder Bowl meeting, you now know why…pure jealousy. We ended up catching a dozen trout to 21 inches long. Now for the rest of Matt’s story, they actually had been fishing in the rain, just not where we were. Other than the big trout, their catch was like ours, a dozen trout to 21 inches. It just looked to us like they only showed up, fished the only non-rain of the day, and caught a fish that could eat ours. We still might kick him, he just looked too good over there.

Super Bowl Sunday was a different day; calm winds and clear skys. We made it a short day to make it in for the Super Bowl stuff. We ran out and anchored on one wreck and stayed there. We ended up catching 15 tautog (I am not supposed to say that I caught 8 of them). No big fish, largest 17-18 inches long. Chris Story caught his first-ever tautog. Phillip Neill caught two tautog that already had tags in them. Keith Blackburn caught our first cod of the year. We had never caught any of them until last spring when we caught a number of them, some just about every tog trip. We had caught pollock over the years but no cod. The cod seem to be spreading south a bit. They are a nice by-catch while tog fishing. So that I can say his name, Danny Forehand caught a cunner. Actually, Danny had our one big tog on. Had it out of the wreck and coming up. The tog went back down and stayed there. We tagged and released most of the tog. The carcasses of the few kept were placed in the VMRC collection freezer behind my boat.