Tuesday 8/10:  Kenny and I had the Rich Comly charter aboard for their yearly "fluke" trip. Rich, his wife Toni, and nephew Scott made up the crew without the rest of the usual cast.  For a change of pace, I decided to try some of my spots to the south of the inlet today in hopes we could scrape up some keepers. My deckhand Kenny pulled a beautiful 10.6# out of some rough bottom down there yesterday, so it was worth a crack.

We got outside, there wasn't a puff of breeze however there was a light SE current that pushed us along. Our first drop yielded zero bites, our second just a couple of short seabass, then subsequent drops yielded pretty much nothing. We did find a small patch of shorts, but even that was painfully slow. I decided to take a little gamble and run further south to fish a couple drops off Lavalette/Ortley out in deep water -- again, no bites.

By noon time, we still had no drift, so we decided it was best to switch over to bottom fishing. We pretty much hopped around from rockpile to rockpile, just picking a few keepers and loads of shorts.

The last drop however, was lock and load with some real nice keepers to 3+ lbs coming up, as well as numerous shorts -- we had quite a few double headers as well. Right on top of the piece in 52' of water, on the second drift, Rich even nailed a nice codfish + seabass double header, and Toni also bagged a nice keeper blackfish.

To sum it up, we fluked for 4.5 hours, and caught about 6 shorts. In the remaining 3 hours, we boated well over 75 seabass, keeping ~25-30 to 3#, as well as Rich's cod and Toni's tog. Fluking was simply horrible, while bottom fishing, as it has done all summer long, picked up the slack quite nicely. Catching codfish in 52' of water in mid August is also bizarre, however it really shows how that stock is rebounding in our area. Rich, Toni and crew will be back in November for the bass - they are a great crew and are a blast to fish with!!!

 Wednesday 8/11:  My mate Michael shot me a text yesterday afternoon that they had gotten into some tog along the sod banks down south, so with both of us having today off we decided to make a go of it this morning. I've been tempted to try this fishery for years (going back to the BillM days!!) and decided to take the ride.

Got in Michael's 18' skiff "Mother-fluker" early on, and with a small cooler full of blue claws, him, myself, and his brother Jason made our way down to the sod banks. With the current roaring early on we started the day by fluking along some channel edges catching a few shorts here and there.

By 9 the current was slacking off so off we went to the spot and double anchored. It only took about 3 minutes and Jason had swung the first tog in the boat, a nice 16" keeper, I followed with another 16" fish. As the current slowed, a slow but steady pick developed of mostly nice tog along with a few real nice triggerfish. Once we got close to slack, the triggers slowed, and the bigger tog put the feedbags on as we boated a few in the 5-7# class, with Jason nailing a beautiful 23" fish which pulled drag and went absolutely nuts, and then I boated a nice 20"er just after. We had to make a wiggle as the tide was turning, and did just that. We put a couple more in the boat, and Mike added a nice 22" fluke, adding more meat to the box...

We wound up boating around 15-20 tog, with most being keepers, we only had a few shorts, as well as 3 triggerfish and the 1 nice keeper fluke. We also had a few seabass. This wound up being a terrific trip, and a great way to spend the morning!! Thanks to Mike for having me down - this is a great fishery and those fish are MEAN in that current!!!

(All pics are in the gallery)