I had been hearing rumors about false albacore here and there along the RI coastline, but I hadn't actually seen one until today. My brother Steve and I went out in his boat today in some big rollers and found good numbers of false albacore tearing up the surface as they feasted on schools of bay anchovies. There were lots of fish breaking, but getting them to hit was a different story as it often is with these fish. We were working an area with about 10 other boats and I will tell you that we landed 4 albies and the rest of the boaters got nothing.
How did we do it? The hot ticket for me was the use of a float and fluke rig (see photo). This is actually a wooden float in which about three feet of mono is attached and a Zoom fluke is attached to a barbed hook to complete the rig. Cast and pop in slowly. Is is THE deadliest way to catch these fussy fish and will outfish any other lure. I wrote about this in my recent On the Water story. I landed three of my fish on this rig. My brother got his fish on a small Deadly Dick, an effective metal lure that many fishermen use.
I had been hearing rumors about false albacore here and there along the RI coastline, but I hadn't actually seen one until today. My brother Steve and I went out in his boat today in some big rollers and found good numbers of false albacore tearing up the surface as they feasted on schools of bay anchovies. There were lots of fish breaking, but getting them to hit was a different story as it often is with these fish. We were working an area with about 10 other boats and I will tell you that we landed 4 albies and the rest of the boaters got nothing.
How did we do it? The hot ticket for me was the use of a float and fluke rig (see photo). This is actually a wooden float in which about three feet of mono is attached and a Zoom fluke is attached to a barbed hook to complete the rig. Cast and pop in slowly. Is is THE deadliest way to catch these fussy fish and will outfish any other lure. I wrote about this in my recent On the Water story. I landed three of my fish on this rig. My brother got his fish on a small Deadly Dick, an effective metal lure that many fishermen use.