16-Year-old Hunter Southall has been having tremendous action with speckled trout. Last week, he weighed in one just shy of 10 pounds. His last trip resulted in ten specks between 24 and 29 inches plus about 40 lesser fish. Rockfish is off the hook right now but Hunter’s dad, Charles, and I decided to leave them alone for a day and join Hunter for this epic speckled trout bite. To sum it up, Hunter kept saying that we should have come last week (Charles and I were both at work last week). It was slow for us. We caught 5 speckled trout between 17 and 21 inches long. It was not slow for others. We did get to see some nice specks. Brandon Bartlett and Zach Hoffman fished the morning near us. They tagged and released speckled trout up to 27 inches long. Capt. Craig Paige, www.paige2charters.com , came in the afternoon and his charter started catching right away. They caught specks up to 28 inches long.
We kept getting messages from fishing buddies telling us that we should have left the specks alone and gone back fishing for striped bass. Capt. Jorj Head, (757) 262-9004, has been having great success eeling large rockfish in the Plantation area. This morning his charter eeled 6 big rockfish at Plantation today including 57 and 45 pounders. Matt Rinck got a 41 pounder there and Scott Elford got a couple just under 40 this morning. Yesterday the fleet got them real good off of the Ramada. Gannets going crazy this morning at the mouth of the bay. Last night at the CBBT, about the 12 mile mark, my cousin Phillip fished the ocean side, incoming tide, anchored up, drifting eels, absolute mayhem. Has no idea how many big stripers they caught. Most over 44 inches. Some they could not stop. Birds were working the lightline hard there. Brandon Bartlett said his friend caught a 65 pounder last night. Phillip sent a photo of a couple 50 pound rockfish caught at the HRBT last night. Chris Boyce fished Cape Henry this morning and limited out like everyone else. Chris also hooked up with a bluefin tuna. He fought it for an hour and a half before breaking it off. He got to look at it and estimated it in the 200-300 pound range. He said there were several other boats in the area that also hooked up with big tuna.
