Trolling Was Tougher But DMS and I Managed
Dan and I decided on Monday that we should each burn a vacation day and go fishing on Wednesday. OK, that's a simple enough plan, so we did it.
We met in line , we were the second boat, of two boats when they opened up.
We tried trolling in areas that we hadn't trolled on Monday and were met with an occasional fish but didn't find the big ones or big schools. I think we had released 4 when we headed for the high dollar spots. We picked up 4 more soon after we got to the areas we fished on Monday but it was noticeably slower. We didn't have any double hook ups and we worked really hard for a few fish.
We had released 8 fish before we went and baited down to eat lunch. Dan picked up one fish that just pulled a full bendo while we were talking with the guys in the next boat. It was the biggest fish that we had boated, so it went into the fish hold.
After eating we did some more exploring and found fish in a few places but only picked up a couple. we released a little one and one fish hit when we were snagged on a point, while I was reeling the free rig in I stopped for a second, when I started reeling again the rig seemed heavier. 1 crank later I saw the fish on the surface. The fish never kicked it's tale before I lifted it out of the water. I think that was the worst striper fight that I've ever had.
Soon we went to the "productive spot" and picked up a few more. We had to keep changing up our tactics but slowly added to our catch. Up to this point we had only had one double.
We started to worry that we had thrown too many fish back earlier and would have to leave with less than limits.
We had 8 in the box at about 4:30 when we decided to go find a school that we hadn't beaten to death.
We found a couple schools in a cove and started working them and picked up a couple singles and lost a couple at the boat too.
That's when we decided to break out a new bag of tricks, specifically targeting the tight schools and using some strike triggering techniques. Finally! We had a pattern. Pass after pass we picked up doubles, four more if my count is correct. We filled out our limits and released a couple fish. I think the last pass got us 3 fish, it was the only time all day that we were both hooked up. Out with the small and in with the "not quite so small".
The last few minutes of our day sure helped to ease the tension. We were both tired. We're not used to the Sun and the heat yet this year.
Here's Dan with some of the catch.
Do these pictures look familiar?
We kept 20.
We think the total catch for the day was 30 fish.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by cutbait
