Friday, May 29, 2015

One Heck of a Week of Mixing it Up

I think I have fished more this week than I ever fished in a week, and that's saying a lot!.  I was working double shifts most of the week fishing freshwater for carp in the mornings and fishing for stripers in the evenings.  I even managed to get out a couple of days in the boat chasing both stripers and black sea bass.
In freshwater, I had the biggest carp week of the year as I landed at least a dozen fish over twenty pounds along with a bunch more in the 15-19 lb. range. They were on the feed.  Biggest fish of the week went 27 lbs.
I fished several evenings from shore and once in the boat in the Bay this week and found good numbers of schoolies.  These weren't big. I got a number of fish on Zoom flukes threaded onto half ounce jigheads fished from the shore.  I found good numbers of schoolies in shallow water spots in the Bay from the boat and landed them on small poppers.
I even got up to Buzzards Bay to fish from the boat.  This place is the black sea bass capital of the East Coast.  And, it didn't disappoint.  In fact, the fishing was the best I have ever seen there.  My brother and I boated well over 200 of them in an afternoon, and we had at least 75 keepers (yes, we did release most of them). These were taken by vertically jigging with
bucktail jigs and Kastmaster XLs.  Hard to believe, but I even got some trolling a swimmer!  We drifted over areas in which they were ten feet thick on the depthfinder. In addition, we caught some huge scup, a bunch of bluefish and even a striper.  It was simply phenomenal fishing for this time of the year.
Check out the photos of this week's action.