Weekend

I did a little boat maintenance Friday morning to get ready for Saturday. While I was there, I thought that I might as well slip out of the inlet for a bit and troll for a king and look for the schools of red drum that have been off of the oceanfront. I did not get a king bite nor did I find the drum. I did see some cobia off of Sandbridge. I did not have any eels with me and they mostly were not interested in my jig. I did get two to bite and lost both of them.

Saturday, the guys wanted to go offshore bottom fishing so off we went. Made a drift and caught blueline tilefish and sea bass so fast that I said we had better stop and count what we have in the boat. We had 39 of our 42 tilefish limit. It was not even breakfast time yet, we needed to leave there. We moved deeper and caught 4 golden tilefish including the smallest I have seen. We let that one go (probably should have kept it, I think there is some study looking for baby golden tiles) and kept the other 3 to finish out our tilefish limit. We moved again to deeper than we normally catch bluelines but shallower than we usually catch goldens to a spot where we have caught grouper. We started catching hake and some nice sea bass. Deep for sea bass but that was OK until we started catching bluelines again. Tried to move out of them but caught more. Not wanting to catch anymore of those that we would have to toss back, we came in early (did not have trolling stuff on board).

Sunday, we ran up in the bay and looked for cobia. We saw plenty and caught one. Some were too small to cast at. I left there and ran back down to Sandbridge as the cobia I had seen there on Friday were some nice ones and I still wanted to find those drum. We got a call from Charles’ son saying that they had schools of drum off of the 4th Island of the CBBT. We had run right past them. We didn’t want to make the run again. We did catch another cobia and one of the guys put out a little spoon and caught some Spanish mackerel. Never saw any drum but we did have a couple of king mackerel air out (king mackerel stuff was back at home).

Back at the dock, the marina manager said that red drum and kings were caught off of the oceanfront on Saturday when we were offshore bottom fishing. He and his wife had caught flounder around some of the wrecks then tried trolling for a dolphin at the SE Lumps but caught a big wahoo instead in that shallow water. He had the photo to show me.