We spent two beautifully calm days on the ocean this weekend. We fished for tautog both days.
Saturday, we caught a total of 15 tautog. None of them were large with 4 being big enough to keep. 4 fish had previously been tagged. We placed tags in others and collected a fin clipping from each fish.
Sunday, we did a lot more moving around and it was even slower than the day before. We had Dr. Hamish Small from VIMS with us displaying a great dedication to his job. On his day off, he was up well before dawn and did not get home until late into the night to conduct on-the-water research. The rest of us were just playing but Hamish was working hard. He should definitely get overtime pay for pulling up that wreck anchor all of those times.
We did not catch our first tautog until late in the afternoon. From then until we ran out of daylight, we caught 11 tog. All were nice fish with no shorts caught. 3 fish were large enough to earn citations. Steve Martin caught our largest fish at 17 pounds. Stan Simmerman caught the second largest at 14 pounds 8 ounces. We caught some nice sea bass that were released and we had a tautog-blueline tilefish double hook-up. That was a first, the tilefish was real surprise. I had not heard of one being caught in less than 100 feet of water. It was by itself. Two season ago, we had a good catch of cod while fishing for tautog. Last season, we caught lobster. This may be the year of the tilefish. Wes Blow caught the tile and he was sure that he had a big tog on.
