Bay watercondition/ Fishing report

[5th Tuition]

Capt. John hasn't been on the water since the hurricane and was having withdrawls. We decided to take "Patent Pending" out for mental health reasons, and check out the conditions on the bay.

Because it was a friendly trip, we didn't leave the dock until 8 am. I'm usually at the boat around 5am getting rods and gear ready for a charter so I figured this was going to be sweet. Well, I would have rather gone down the boat at 5 than 8am. The traffic on Solomons Island Road (Rt 2) was awfull. Not only just traffic, but a multi car accident thrown in as well.

I still got to the boat early and had rods ready when the Captain and his guest arrived.

Now Capt. John is a troller. I have had success getting him to throw some plastics and metal at breaking fish AFTER we had the box full of fish for the customers. Whenever we speak on the phone about one of my personal trip, I'm always relaying information about how I did livelinning (my personal choice for this time of year). So imagine how surprised I was when he showed up at the dock yesterday morning with a 55 gal plastic drum set up for a livewell.

We left a muddy Rockhold Creek and soon found cleaner water in the bay proper. The water actually looked good. We kept a sharp eye out for debris and didn't find hardly any at all. There was the occassional crab basket or small piece of wood, but nothing unusual. It looked no worse than if we had a really high tide that lifted some small stuff off the shoreline.

We found lots of bait near Sharps Island Light and set the 7 rod spread. Bait, but noone else home. We picked up the spread and headed to the Choptank to catch some spot. The area I use has been providing us with enough spot to make the day successful and have some left over to give away to other boats before we leave. I like to have a half dozen spot for each person on board. More spot is benificial if the blues terrorize the spot, but 6 each is often more than enough.

I told John to drift until we had found a pocket of bait, then we could anchor up on them and catch our bait. WELL; we drifted and caught one. Moved the boat so we had a slightly different drift, caught another spot. What the he!! was going on. Set up another drift and caught one. Now this was certainly not normal. We tried several more drifts (and we weren't drifting too fast) only to come up with a grand total of 5 spot. I think I felt Capt. John's eyes burning a hole in the back of my head. I think he was missing the drone of his diesele engine as we troll.

I finally said "Look, let's take these 5 spot and just check out the False Channel and see what's going on". We anchored (It may be the first time his anchor has seen the mud) and as soon as the first spot was over, it was FISH ON. We caught 3 nice rock on our 5 spot. One was cut in half by a big blue, and the other was snatched right off the hook without hokking up. By the way, have you ever tried to catch 5 spot in a 55 gallon drum.

We trolled the area (no surprise) and picked up a few more rock. We finally picked up and headed back toward Deale keeping a close eye for birds. The sun had come out, sunglasses were on, and the rain from the morning was simply just a distant memory.

Birds, Birds, Birds. Over went the trolling rods. We were in heaven. Rock, up to 25 inches and blues 15-18 inches went into the box. We limited out on rock and started filling the box with blues. John should have rockfish and blue sandwiches and platters at the South County Cafe this week.

I continue to be impressed with Capt. Johns spreader bars and his homemade spoons. We couldn't keep those pesky rockfish off the line. We wanted more blues!!!!

We probably kept 30 of the bigger blues, and left the birds still working when we headed for the dock. As we approached Deale, the water turned a little more turbid.

My main concern for trolling, is the grass beds we started to see closer to Deale. The grasses from the susqy will be here in force, fouling lines. Bottom fishing, or livelinning may be the only way to fish for a while.

I hope the trash doesn't come too far south so that we can all have access to some fine fall fishing. Best of luck to all.
5th (Marty)