Healthy Grin Sport Fishing

I was one of the speakers at the Catchin’ For Kids Sportfishing Show on Sunday, http://www.catchinforkids.org/2011%20Sportfishing%20Show.html . Robert Smith (mate on the Reel Escape) was at the show. They had a charter out of Hatteras the day before. His report was big seas and no tuna. It was too rough to get north to the bluefin bite. There were some bluefin and yellowfin caught on Friday close to Hatteras but Saturday it was all false albacore (still great bluefin action out of Oregon Inlet). He said that he had a cooler of false albacore in his truck if I wanted them. I said sure, that we would feed them to some grouper. Robert wants an invite for that trip (Rob, I have your cooler in my truck).

It was not a great fishing report as we were scheduled to fish the following day with our friends on the Big Tahuna: www.bigtahuna.com . A group of us go down to Hatteras and fish with them each year. We always have a good time and get in some offshore action when we are tired of waiting for Virginia offshore season to start. The forecast was marginal with winds to 30 kts expected by the afternoon. The morning started off calm and we thought about making the run to the 700 line area where the bluefin bite has been. We decided to stay closer to Hatteras and fish where they had caught some tuna Friday. We trolled and jigged and never caught a tuna. By mid-morning, it was howling so we had made the best weather decision, just not a good tuna decision. We caught a bunch of false albacore and a variety of jacks. We had some shark encounters. We came in early when the waves started to break into the cockpit. We now have an abundance of bait for deep-dropping and flounder strips. We had fun catching bait. Now, if those bluefin will just stay put until next weekend, they are close enough for a run out of Virginia Beach. The Hatteras yellowfin bite should take off any day now.

I caught this 24-inch tog on the Consol wreck on Feb. 12. It already had a tag in it. It turns out that I had originally tagged that tog almost exactly 5 years earlier, same wreck. At that time, the fish was 22 inches long. It is still there with the tag still in it.

Nice day on the water today. Went to the Triangles Wrecks solo. Caught 25 tautog. Kept 4 fish, 21-22 inches long. Tagged the rest. Pulled the hook on a couple of larger-feeling fish.

Dr. Ken Neill, III
IGFA Representative
www.igfa.org
www.pswsfa.com
www.vbsf-hookedup.net/healthygrin/

No trophy rockfish, citation-sized tautog or sea monsters from the deep. Yesterday was much slower than our last several trips. We spent most of the day on the Triangle Wrecks. Obviously not knowing the secret spot, we caught very few tautog. Actually, the total was 5 and I see no reason to report that Steve Martin caught 4 of those. Cod seem to be getting bigger and Wes Blow caught out 2 largest so far. Still not the big cod that they have up north but a nice bycatch on a slow tog day. Never saw another boat all day. We did make a side trip offshore to the Ocean Venture to see if we could get a tog out there to eat our crab baits. We caught some big sea bass that were let go. It was so slow that Wes actually kept (and ate) a spiny dogfish. He said it was not bad.

Dr. Ken Neill, III
IGFA Representative
www.igfa.org
www.pswsfa.com
www.vbsf-hookedup.net/healthygrin/

We believe in sea monsters. Each time we head out bottom fishing in the deep, we hook up with something that we just cannot handle. Sometimes, it is a grouper with an attitude that just takes us down into the rocks and breaks us off. We know that happens as on our last trip out there, Roger Burnley had one get him hung in the rocks and he did the tautog trick of just giving the fish slack for a while and sure enough, it swam back out. Roger had it coming up and it went back in the rocks again. Free spool again and the trick worked a second time and this time he got it up. It was a 50-pound snowy grouper. Nice fish but no sea monster. Other times, someone will hook into something that just will not come off of the bottom at all and eventually something breaks: angler, leader, rod, line, or hook. We know that there are big sharks, grouper and wreckfish that get into the hundreds of pounds and we expect to tangle with a secret population of Atlantic halibut sometime we are out there.

It is never good to lose a fish after going toe to toe for an hour or so and we always wonder what it was that just broke our tackle. Wes Blow really hates it and he had John Bishop make him a custom rod just to handle these monsters. He still needs to get a new reel and harness for it but for yesterday, he went with his old reel. He had his grouper rigs tied with huge hooks and 300-pound leader. Wes was hunting for sea monsters. He hooked one and got into another one of those bad fights. I thought Wes was going to break his back. It turned out the 300-pound leader broke first. Wes was out of action for a little bit. Bernie Sparrer hooked up to what seemed like a nice grouper and had it coming up. It went back down and broke him off in the rocks. Wes was re-rigged and had stretched out his back so back into the fray he went and hooked up to something big again. He said this not in the same class as the last one but it still looked like a pretty good fight to me. He would get it up a ways and them it would go back down again. Overtime, Wes gained more than the fish could take back. Roger said, “Look at the size of that air bubble coming up”. We often will see air bubbles ahead of tilefish or grouper but Roger was not seeing bubbles. He had the first glimpse of Wes’ sea monster. It turned out to be an odd-looking shark. Counting the long tail, about 12-feet long and very fat. The thing had some wicked teeth. It did not have a dorsal fin where a shark is supposed to have one. It had a single dorsal fin back near the tail. It behaved pretty well until we tried to control it with a gaff and remove the hook. Wes was leaning over the boat and trying to get the hook out. I think the thing wanted to eat Wes so it was released with the hook still there.

We did catch a nice snowy grouper, some black belly rosefish, all the spiny dogfish you could want and we did catch some blueline tilefish (one citation-sized). We spent most of the time deep trying to avoid sea bass but still caught some of those which were released.

We headed out of Rudee Inlet Sunday morning to find big waves and birds working right outside of the inlet. It looked good. We joined a couple of other boats trolling the area. We did not get a quick bite so we picked them up and ran south. We were sorry we did. No fish and big following seas were going to make for a miserable ride back. The fish were not where we left them last week…we kept going. 32 miles south of the inlet, we found the birds. Actually, there were gannets everywhere, all along the coast but these were thick and working 1/2 mile off of the beach. It never stopped. Birds and fish feeding all day. We constantly caught fish for 8 full hours when we finally gave up. The fish never did. We started out trolling, all of the rods would go down, then whoever was not on a tolling rod would break out their jigs and hook up. Eventually, we just put away the trolling gear and just jigged them. The fish were feeding on large herring, maybe 10 inches long. They were fresh enough that they looked like they should still be alive when they were spit up on the deck. Everyone is sore today. We kept our limit of big rockfish letting the largest go. We registered 10 citations, 9 releases and there were more we did not measure. Ric kept his first weight citation rockfish at 42 pounds. We had a number of others in the 40 something pound range that were let go. By the afternoon, the wind had calmed down and it was a nice ride back to the inlet.

It was beautiful out there yesterday. Ran about 50 miles south looking for striped bass and never found anything to fish on. Declaring the striped bass extinct, we went offshore a bit and ran back north just looking for life and still never found anything. We stopped on the Consols wreck and caught 15 tautog on leftover clams from the day before. Wes Blow lost our one cod at the boat. No citation-sized togs this time. Running in, could barely make out some birds on the Radar directly into the setting sun inshore. Was not sure there was anything but turned into the beach. Found them just as we lost the sun. Nice class of fish. Caught about 20 in a very short time of light left. Every rod hooked up, the tandem rigs with two fish on. Charles Southall weighed in a 45 pounder (had this and another nice fish on the same rod). Wes weighed a 42-pound fish (his first weight rockfish). Steve Martin released a 45-inch fish. Fish were all over the boat. I think there were some other release citation size but we did not measure any others, just released them and got the bait back in the water as fast as possible. Screen was lit up with fish from the time we found them until pitch black. Slow, slow day ended with pure bedlam. Came in with our limit of big fish. 22 miles south of Rudee. These fish are moving north. Nice speckled trout just sitting there, beside the boat at the fuel dock, while we were cleaning fish. There was nothing in the rockfish’s stomachs.

We ran out after tautog again today. It was a bit choppy but not too bad. We caught 19 tog and 4 cod. Fish were a bit larger this weekend. Matt Sheppard caught a 23 inch tautog that he released for a citation after we tagged it. I caught one 24 inches that already had a tag in it (TB133351). It weighed over 9 pounds on the Boga Grip. We let it go with the tag still in it. Everything was caught on clam today. We’re headed back out after something in the morning.

Dr. Ken Neill, III
IGFA Representative
www.igfa.org
www.pswsfa.com
www.vbsf-hookedup.net/healthygrin/

Saturday I joined Charles and Hunter Southall for a trip to the Elizabeth River. We stood in the rain all day catching the occasional small speckled trout. There was hardly anybody else around. I guess they were being dry somewhere. Capt. Blake Hayden was out in the rain with us and we fished near him some of the time. We saw his charter catch 2 big speckled trout. They were using baits as large as some of the trout we were catching. Then there was Matt. There was one brief time in the afternoon when the rain stopped and sky lightened a bit. That is when a center console pulls up and Hunter says that looks like the boat Matt Rinck has been fishing on ( I think it is Joey Stratton’s boat). Sure enough, Matt gives us a wave. They get the boat positioned and about that time, one ray of sunlight breaks through the clouds and shines down directly on a boat that looks like it has just been washed and waxed. It is one of those fancy boats with all of the high-tech stuff like automatic bilge pumps. We were using a scoop, cut out of a Clorox bottle, to bail out the water in Hunter’s skiff. Looking like a GQ model, Matt strikes his Captain Morgan pose on the bow and proceeds to cast. Within 15 minutes he is bowed up to a big trout. We know it is a big trout because Joey is giving us the “big fish” sign. During the fight, it looks like Matt is posing for some magazine cover. Actually, it would have been a good shot with the spotlight from heaven shining down on him while the rest of the world was under a cloud. Being in a little skiff with pouring rain all day, I did not bring my good camera so I yelled over to them, “quit posing and catch your fish already, I don’t have my camera”. They soon netted a pretty trout that measured at 27.5 inches long. I asked them to take a photo and send it to me. Soon after they released the fish, it started to mist. Joey and Matt left before it started raining again. I looked at Charles and said, “Can you believe this?” Charles said that the next time he saw Matt that he just might walk over and kick him. So Matt, if someone just kicks you at the next Flounder Bowl meeting, you now know why…pure jealousy. We ended up catching a dozen trout to 21 inches long. Now for the rest of Matt’s story, they actually had been fishing in the rain, just not where we were. Other than the big trout, their catch was like ours, a dozen trout to 21 inches. It just looked to us like they only showed up, fished the only non-rain of the day, and caught a fish that could eat ours. We still might kick him, he just looked too good over there.

Super Bowl Sunday was a different day; calm winds and clear skys. We made it a short day to make it in for the Super Bowl stuff. We ran out and anchored on one wreck and stayed there. We ended up catching 15 tautog (I am not supposed to say that I caught 8 of them). No big fish, largest 17-18 inches long. Chris Story caught his first-ever tautog. Phillip Neill caught two tautog that already had tags in them. Keith Blackburn caught our first cod of the year. We had never caught any of them until last spring when we caught a number of them, some just about every tog trip. We had caught pollock over the years but no cod. The cod seem to be spreading south a bit. They are a nice by-catch while tog fishing. So that I can say his name, Danny Forehand caught a cunner. Actually, Danny had our one big tog on. Had it out of the wreck and coming up. The tog went back down and stayed there. We tagged and released most of the tog. The carcasses of the few kept were placed in the VMRC collection freezer behind my boat.

Photo by Matt Lusk: