I stopped the boat just outside the inlet at 3:30 AM. The wind was howling. I turned and said that the Albemarle can handle it but are you guys sure that you want to go out there and Wes does not get to talk. Wes Blow is plumb crazy: unless it is a named storm, he is ready to fish. Roger Burnley said the he would rather go and wish that we had not, than to not go and wish that we had. Not being sure of that logic, I asked Stan Simmerman what he thought. I did not ask his 13-year-old son, Deven, as I am afraid that he may have more screws loose than Wes. Stan said that he was up for anything. I said OK, it is not going to be pretty. We ran out to the Norfolk Canyon, never seeing another boat all day…imagine that. It was really too rough to fish deep. We tried one of our grouper spots and Roger hooked up to what appeared to be a nice fish right off. He lost that one and then it turned into a lesson in futility. I am constantly backing the boat into the wind to try and slow the drift, waves are breaking over the transom and Deven and Stan forgot their raingear. It was not pretty. We decided to move shallower and maybe go back deeper if the wind let up. It never did. It was a lot easier fishing more shallow and we had steady action on blueline tilefish and jumbo sea bass. We caught two smooth dogfish and never saw the first spiny dog. We did catch some spiny dogs on the Triangles last week but they have not invaded the offshore bottom yet.
Back at the dock, we weighed in 5 citations. There were a few others that may have made it if we had put them on the scale. A lot of the sea bass were in the 3-4 plus pound range. Deven got his first sea bass citation. He is 13 so he has a lot of firsts ahead of him. Roger Burnley also got his first sea bass citation which surprised me. He said that he had caught them over 7 pounds but that was back in his commercial fishing days. This was the largest he had ever caught while recreationally fishing.
