Saturday Bottomfish

The blueline tilefish season closes at the end of October. The tuna and wahoo bite is excellent right now but the guys wanted tilefish again before it closes. It hurt my feelings a bit but bottom fishing we went. I did expect Stan to bring his two rods he had made for daytime swordfish dropping but when they showed up at the boat, they were not with them. I asked where is the swordfish stuff…they “forgot” it. Yea, I expect they knew that after about 10 minutes of tilefish I would be saying let’s go swordfishing. It was a gorgeous run out. We caught a limit of nice bluelines and then moved deeper to try for other stuff. We caught more bluelines. I had never caught bluelines that deep before but even over 100 fathoms, we were loading up with bluelines. We did use a “Seaqualizer” device to release them but even with that, I was not happy releasing these fish from the deep so after trying several spots and not being able to get away from them, we ran in shallower to a wreck and caught a nice mess of sea bass. We also had a rather good porgy bite. Back at the dock while fueling up, a boat came in and threw seven nice wahoo on the dock. I told the guys, good luck getting me to go tilefishing next weekend. They just laughed and said that it will be closed.

Very close to home, I have been fishing off of my dock in Seaford most every night this month. I go castnet some shrimp (some we eat) put them on a hook and catch speckled trout, striped bass, red drum, and perch. This is going on in all of the creeks, inlets and rivers…fun and easy fall fishing. Shrimp have become much more common over the past few years. A very small scale, experimental commercial fishery is being tried along the oceanfront. This is the second fall that it has been tried. Bycatch is being closely monitored and the area they are allowed to fish and the net size they are allowed to use are both small. So far, Virginia shrimping has been very good.