Fishy Weekend

I had run my boat around to Dare Marina and Yacht Sales for the PSWSFA Youth and Ladies Tournament the previous weekend. I had a long list of things to be fixed on the boat. I told them that I was going to leave it there for the week and that none of this stuff is keeping me from fishing. I asked them to fix any of it they could get to and I would be running it back to Rudee Inlet Station Marina to fish offshore the following weekend. Mid-week, I got a call saying the boat was done. OK, what did you get to? All of it…I love that kind of service.

I ran the boat around Saturday morning and picked up the crew at Rudee. We trolled plugs along the beach for a king mackerel. We caught a cobia. The guys started putting out spoons and that was ridiculous. They never got out more than two. They were constantly cranking in nice Spanish mackerel.

Yesterday, we ran out to the Norfolk Canyon. The ride out was beautiful. When we got there, the wind picked up and rain moved in. It stayed that way most of the day. It not matter, fishing was great. We tried the live-baiting thing again. We caught chub mackerel, bridled them up, and trolled them around. We ended up catching 8 white marlin, jumped off about as many, and I do not know how many encounters we had. We caught one that did not have a bill. We collected fin clips for a genetics research project at VIMS and recorded hook location to see if the circle hooks are behaving the same as previous studies done with trolled ballyhoo. We have only tried this a few times and have had success each trip. A difference this trip is that we did not catch a single shark. That was a nice change.