305 Pound Bigeye and 1,000+ Pound Stringer Hit the Dock on Day 2 of the Big Fish Classic
By Scott Lenox
Posted on July 27th, 2024
I just got home from day 2 of the 11th Annual HUK Big Fish Classic and it was absolutely insane! Only 15 boats out of 88 fished the first window from lines in at 7 AM yesterday until lines out at 3 PM today, but we saw lots of fish and a couple of things that neither I or my good buddy Weighmaster Coconut Hedges had ever seen in all our years of OC tournaments.
Thing #1 we’d never seen……a 305 pound bigeye tuna.
Thing #2 we’d never seen……a five fish stringer of over 1,000 pounds.
Yup, here’s who’s leading after two days of fishing.
Biggest Fish
1st Place Primary Search 305 Lb Bigeye
2nd Place MJs 288 Lb Bigeye
3rd Place Full Service 224.5 Lb Bigeye
Biggest Stringer
1st Place MJs 1077.5 Lbs
2nd Place Fishin’ Fever 536.5 Lbs
3rd Place Real One 340 Lbs
Mahi
1st Place Reel Estate 23 Lbs
Away from the tournament, the crew of Spring Mix II with Captain Chris Watkowski had a good day with the mahi putting their anglers on a limit of fish.
Captain Nick Sampson on MobSquad has been showing the kids a good time lately with bluefish, mahi and some big blueline tilefish.
Captain Bill Brown, Dylan Decker, Rocky Brown, Warren Brown and Cheryl Brown had an excellent day with the blueline tilefish on board the private boat Gulfstream out of Pines Point Marina.
Captain Jason Mumford of Lucky Break Charters found some more throwback flounder and this keeper for his party today.
Captain Marc Spagnola of Dusk to Dawn Bowfishing put his shooters on the meat again with these rays from the southern bay.
Captain Chris Mizurak of the Angler reported a heavy current today, but he still managed some sea bass and keeper flounder for his folks.
Steve Tapley fished the OC Inlet last night where he found this big ribbonfish on a lure.
Captain Monty Hawkins of the Morning Star had a nice day with the sea bass today along with a couple of exotics.
Yesterday’s NNE winds gone and with no remaining swell – nothing but calm water lay before us as we cleared the inlet. What a great and glorious day to head off the beach with The House of Z and Santa!
{{Tomorrow (Sunday/28th July) will be incredibly calm.. I may not even have half my spots sold. Call Anna at 443-235-5577 or email me [email protected] if interested}}
By and by Emma, Ellie, & Addy deployed our reef pyramids for the day. We continued on.
Soon found yesterday’s wind may have died off, but the current sure hadn’t..Talk about ripping! NE current was smokin..
Made it work though. Melissa & Lori had a perfect tie to split the pool money. My anglers found similar result both drifting & anchored – a few seriously nice cbass everywhere we went
..and no mahi.
Wasn’t a mahi trip but I sure had an eye out for em. Dang things were catchable by accident a few weeks ago. I’m sure hoping they come back in number.
Have been combing through old letters and fish reports for a few specific passages. Not “the one” – yet it is another passage pointing at my long-held beliefs about spawning production in sea bass. This was after our worst spring run of sea bass ever. I felt there was no need of males to rush in and claim their spawning spots because there just wasn’t competition for them.
It also addresses using monofilament for reef fishing – something quite rare indeed today now that stretch free spectra has almost completely replaced it..
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From Fish Report 6/9/15
Very unusual, I did have a guy goose-egg on sea bass recently even though fishing was pretty decent. Current screaming, we had 12 ounces of lead on everyone’s rod. The only guy adamant about using monofilament fishing line (instead of a spectra micro-braid line like Power-Pro) was the only guy with clean ice in his cooler.
I used to write this all the time when mono was still in common use: Friends don’t let friends fish mono. The sensitivity difference is too huge. Even an expert angler will catch more sea bass with braid. Just because you can catch fish w/mono doesn’t make it a good choice. Because a soldier can hit time & again w/a pistol at 100 yards does not mean he should prefer a pistol in combat; just because you have a sweet old-time hotrod in the garage does not mean you should drive it to work..
When cbass fishing was smoking-hot in 2002/03 I saw the difference between mono & spectra braid virtually everyday. First high-speed conventional reels loaded w/braid would limit out; then 2 to 1 gear-ratio conventionals such as the old Penn 65 rental reels; then spinning reels w/braid who were followed by conventional reels w/mono – and, always last, spinners w/mono would be the final anglers to limit out before we could leave for home.
Back then people fishing braid would be giving fish to anglers using mono by day’s end. Sometimes I’d even tell a guy with a spinning reel loaded w/mono before we left the dock; “People with rental rods are going to be giving you fish.”
Seriously. On my boat friends don’t let friends fish mono.
No one’s giving fish away these days. I’ll go into that in greater detail in coming weeks. Sea bass that used to start spawning even in their first year of life, & always by year one, are now spawning by age 3 – just as we start taking them. That’s a year after they’ve been legal to commercial fishers.
This spawning delay is a simple biological response to cbass’ natural perception of “habitat capacity” & shouldn’t be above management’s pay grade.
However; unless something drastic happens to US regulation in this iteration of the Magnuson Act, I fear we’ll soon lose our opportunity for creating explosive sea bass population growth permanently.
Sure, sure; we’ll still have a few fish, even decent fish; but our sea bass fishery will be a testament to mediocrity. The possibility of creating bigger populations of sea bass than have EVER existed hinges on management’s comprehension of accelerating spawning production via size limit regulation.
Habitat fidelity is the driver behind this biological response. We lived it; we witnessed it. DelMarVa honestly saw sea bass at ‘habitat capacity’ via exponential population growth in 2002/2003 just seven years into sea bass management.
Now 18 years into the management of our most common reef fish, NOAA’s using recreational catch estimates like a club to beat production theories of reproductive biology & reef ecology into silence.
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