Bass moving on?
Decided with the weather being a crap shoot to leave the dock late and sleep in. Shoved off at 5:30 with the sun rising, light to no wind and few clouds. Broke the inlet and was greeted with flipping bunker.
Pod hopped for a couple hours moving North as we moved on. Bunker was from MI pretty much all the way up to Red Church. Unfortunately they were small pods, scattered easily and had nothing on them. Most pods would sound as the line hit the water over them or the snag hit water.
Switched over to fluking and picked away at them and sea bass. frustrated with fish that were right on the 18″ line or just under we moved further North to where we had fish last week.
Right away we found a pod of fish making short 50-75 yard drifts over them. But again the fish were just borderline keepers. We kept a few that were just over and a couple of sea bass.
Also had a few small robins, a sculpin and a skate. Larger robins were kept for crab bait. Almost forgot…I guess we had some sort of inshore Garbage Fish Slam…sea robin, sculpin, skate, star fish and Jersey snow crab (spider crab). At least we had variety. We tried but could not find a doggie to complete the Grand Slam!
Water was flat for the most part, one in a while there would be a big roller. Had a couple sprinkles start about 11-11:30 as we were heading in. water temps ranged from 60.2 to 65.5 depending on time and location. Bait…pretty much anything worked…spearing, squid strip, sun dial strip, squid heads (my favorite) gulp jerk shads and shrimp.
Got back to the dock, gear off and the skies opened up…perfect timing…let nature do the washing!
Are the striped ones moving on or did the coming storms put them off the feed? Hopefully they were just taking some time off of feeding and stick around a few more weeks. Unfortunately next week we will be busy with the shark tournaments and Fourth of July weekend we usually take our first offshore trip. If they stick around hopefully they wait till mid July to move on so we can get one more shot at them.
Tags: bait, bucktail, bunker, fluke, Gulp!, jigging, sea bass, spearing, striped bass
