Saturday morning, Capt. Jorj Head (757-262-9004) and friends did some chumming for cobia off of Back River. They caught 3. Alan Meetze caught the largest at 82.5 pounds.
Saturday evening I ran over to the buoy 10 area with Tricia. She had not been with us when we tagged all of those reds (tags should start popping off June 24). As soon as it got dark, the bite was on. She caught 3 big red drum back to back and said that was plenty. That was a good thing because I had a crew meeting me at the dock in a few hours and I needed a nap. We called Capt Craig Paige over to us. I don’t know how many he ended up with but we could hear his drags screaming as we were leaving. We were anchored in 20 feet of water and were using live blue crabs as bait.
Jorj and crew showed up at the boat dark and early. We have a big flounder tournament coming up where we are providing free food and drink to the participants (actually, it is the sponsors who are making that possible along with the $3,000 first place prize), http://www.pswsfa.com/FlounderBowl_09.htm . Jorj thought it would be good if we had one of our fish fries as part of this. We have been at tournaments where the catch is cooked but that does not work out so well for flounder (or tuna) tournaments. The anglers want to keep their catch. I told Jorj that if he put a crew together, we can get plenty of fish. He did and we did. We ran south and worked our way up to the Norfolk Canyon. We got a good catch of big sea bass and blueline tilefish. Next were golden tilefish and we wacked them. It was as good as I’ve seen it. The largest were 50 pounds. Moved off of them and left them biting. Easy to fish these critters out. Moved over to a grouper hole and hooked up two beasts. Jorj made a lot of funny faces and noises before his broke off. We had the other grouper slowly coming up when it went crazy. We came up with a cut off hook. I think a big shark got that one. We got back dark and late.
Monday morning, Tricia wakes me up ready to go fishing. I was not moving too well. She was ready to go after spadefish. That sounded like a lot of work. I had visions of walking down to the little boat, making the little run to Back River, setting up a chum slick and taking a nice long nap. I talked her into it. Not the nap thing. I told her about the cobia reports, we can catch spadefish anytime. The cobia bite is on fire right now. They are jumping in the boat. One hundred pounders every trip. We did not catch a cobia but the nap thing worked out just fine.
...Please take me fishing