A Fishy Weekend

Tricia and I flew down to south Florida to attend the 30th Annual Banquet of the IGFA. It was held at the IGFA Hall of Fame & Museum. It was a very nice event and the museum is a place all recreational anglers should visit, especially if you find the history and development of sport fishing, fishery conservation and fishery science interesting: www.igfa.org .  I got to visit with a number of people that I have not fished with in awhile. Guy Harvey was there (IGFA Trustee and the featured artist of the banquet) so I was able to thank him personally for his fabulous donation to the upcoming banquet of our fishing club.

The next day, I went fishing. George Poveromo told me that we were right near his home inlet and that I should fish with Capt. Skip Dana, “If there was a sailfish around, he will find it”. Skip owns a pair of “drift boats”. We would call them head boats. Skip said that was how he earns a living, sailfish are more of a passion: www.bluewatermovements.com/captain_skip_dana.php . I met Skip in the morning. He said that the sailfish bite was on fire last week but was really slow this week, it was too calm. He said they needed a stiff NE blow to turn them back on. Sounds like some cobia fishermen I know. We gave them a try and Skip made a “long” run to where he thought the bite would be better to the north. We were putting lines in after a 10 minute run. He had just got the first kite up when the first sailfish was on. It was a nice one and mean. About 30 minutes into the fight, another sailfish ate a kite bait. It was a smaller fish and close to the boat. I put the first rod in the holder and went and fought the second sail. We released that one in about 10 minutes and it was back to the first one. That fish just did not want to behave but I eventually got it to the boat for the release. We had a couple of other encounters, caught some bonito, and had some king bite offs but those were the only sailfish hook ups of the day. We were right off of the beach on a sunny, 83 degree day.

Meanwhile, back in Virginia:

Wes Blow fished a coastal wreck for tautog on Saturday and then he fished the Elizabeth River Sunday afternoon. On Saturday, they caught 25 tautog. He was fishing a wreck where we had tagged a lot of tautog previously and he caught a number with tags in them. He placed tags in the fish that had not been tagged and he collected a DNA sample from each fish for VIMS. Several fish had significant wounds that had healed. On Sunday, Wes caught speckled trout. Wes tags and releases almost every speckled trout he catches but he kept this 10 plus pound gator.

Hunter Southall fished the Elizabeth River Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning having great success catching both speckled trout and puppy drum. On Sunday, he had William Goldsmith with him. Willy is one of the newer grad students at VIMS who has been fishing with us. He got his undergrad degree at Harvard and he is a passionate New England angler learning to fish Virginia. He was on the James catching blue cats the day before. Over the two days, they caught speckled trout to about 27 inches and puppy drum to 33 inches. They caught fish on both live bait and artificials.

 

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