Deep Creatures

We got out yesterday and did some bottom fishing. As expected, the spiny dogfish were bad, especially on the south side of the canyon while trying for golden tilefish. On the north wall of the canyon, we caught a lot of smooth dogfish…like the canyon was a dividing line. We also caught a dogfish that seemed almost a cross between the two. More body type and spots like a spiny but there were no spines. Stan says there is a dogfish they catch in the nets, wintertime, Eastern Shore that the watermen just call spotted sharks. I did not get a photo of that.  We caught a fish that had big eyes, big mouth, not much in the way of teeth that we are not sure of what it is yet.

We did manage to catch a single golden tilefish and some hake. We caught silver hake and a regular looking hake. I assume that most of the hake we catch are white hake. Since we got the world-record Carolina hake, the crew assumes every hake is another Carolina hake. Stan is going to weigh this one to see if it is bigger than Johnny’s record and then we would have to figure out what the hake it is.

We stayed deep all day to avoid blueline tilefish due to the closure. We still caught one in 100 fathoms. Deepest we’ve caught one of those. Used a seaqualizer gadget to release it down deep. Doubtful that it helped but we tried.