Sea Bass and Triggerfish Yesterday

The water that we caught the tuna in last weekend is still out there but with a marginal forecast, we decided to leave a little later in the morning and go wreck fishing instead. Our crew was to include US Congressman Randy Forbes and US Congressman and now gubernatorial candidate, Rob Wittman. We are really not trying to form a republican caucus out on the water, it is just that these guys like to fish and are trying to get out there with us as much as they can prior to Congress reconvening. Rob joined us during a trip this past spring, at the request of Sport Fishing Magazine, for a feature that should be coming out this coming spring. It turned out that Rob is as much of a fishing nut as the rest of our crew and joins us when he can. He was bringing Congressman Forbes but it turned out that Randy could not make this trip so we were down to one politician.

It was rough but we went anyway. We managed a nice catch of sea bass and caught a bunch of triggerfish. We weighed in five for citations up to 5 pounds 8 ounces. We caught a lot of bluefish, a number of jacks of various species, a tautog, a flounder, a big porgy and other stuff. The other stuff included conger eels and the Sandtiger sharks visited us again. What were new were the sea turtles. We had turtles around us all day and they really liked our congressman (so did the sharks and conger eels). He caught two sea turtles but fortunately, both were hooked externally. We were able to remove the hooks while leaving the turtles in the water.