Posted on July 16th, 2022
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It was a little humid today, but otherwise it was pretty darn nice and there were lots of anglers out enjoying it since it was a Saturday. There was some ok offshore fishing, some good party boat fishing and some real good flounder fishing for some of my ocean flounder buddies.
My friend and neighbor Curt Presnell fished some ocean structure today and did very, very well with the flounder. Curt only fished two hours and had a limit of fish with everything over 22″. He even had fish on two at a time.
Blake Gunther and his crew fished ocean structure today as well and had a nice day of fluking. They finished with one sea bass and nine keeper flounder with five of those over 20″.
Laura Foerster Puglisi landed this stud flounder with a Fish in OC rig this afternoon.
The crew of the Reel Current with Captain Shawn Gibson had a nice mixed bag offshore today with a white marlin release, some tuna fish and some tilefish.
It was a little slower today for the crew of Turnin’ Fins, but Captain Jake Shaffer did put his crew on a quality yellowfin.
Steve Hadley, Sam Hadley, Eric Farrell and Phil Fields fished on their Fishbox today and had a couple of nice tuna chunking at the Hambone. They also had two nice dolphin and some sea bass from the Jackspot.
Captain Chris Mizurak of the Angler had some good fishing today with sea bass and several flounder coming up.
Anglers on board the Morning Star with Captain Monty Hawkins enjoyed smooth sailing and some big ol sea bass.
What a fine day at sea; a fantastic day for introducing the youngest anglers to reef fishing. Had a few aboard too. They sure made a show of it.
After Ms Avery from nearby Trappe gave our reef blocks and tog-pipe condos a shove, we pressed on.
Found the current absolutely flying this morning. Don’t know why. Told the boys to put away the helium infused sinkers and just go with straight lead. Worked OK.
Ron was red hot out of the gate – shot up to 7 nice sea bass early in the trip while some anglers still had a donut. Something hit a switch though. He boxed one more while many clients slowly marched past him. Thankfully he came back around and finished just shy a limit.
I tell stories like that to reinforce the truth of it – this is fishing. An angler of great skill, like Ron, can be made luckless in a moment.
Happens.
The boat ended up doing very well with more that half of my folks in double digits. Three even limited.
Ms Avery harnessed her reef building karma to pocket today’s pool money.
For the last two years we rode high with many limits, even boat limits in high summer. That great fishing was brought on by the spawning surge as sea bass recolonized the Maryland Wind Energy Area. As I’ve been writing for years now, that peak must taper – is. Fish that escaped effort are growing some kind of nice, but numbers are diminishing.
I predicted the whole thing in writing to management and science in 2016/17. If you’re like me, you’d think fisheries management & science would be super keen on finding a way to make a population of sea bass absolutely explode.
No interest at all so far as I can tell.
Pretty disappointing.
But what the heck, I’ve tried to get NOAA interested in our corals since 2000 too. Yeah, no. They recognize we have reef fish, yet have no concern for their habitat — not that I’ve seen.
I’ve lived mad sea bass expansion twice. In 2003 I absolutely believed our sea bass were at habitat capacity—that the only way we could ever make them more abundant was by building reef. From 2004 to 2006 I ran every scenario I knew of trying to figure why our region’s sea bass stock was diminishing despite tougher and tougher regs.
Turns out, and I am sure, that we manipulate spawning age via size limit. And, unlike common theory that big females are the path to grand restorations; in sea bass we want ALL ocean found fish spawning, not just the “big bullies.”
During pre-regulation/self regulation/early state and fed regulation we’d see a good percentage of under 9 inch sea bass becoming mini-knotheads — all lit up in green & blue. They’re spawning males & super easy to spot. We also saw them in great number as the MD WEA recolonized with sea bass.
In every case when I’ve seen small males, sea bass numbers surged.
This year, and my guys have watched closely, we’ve seen one under 9 inch male. That fish will likely be blinded and killed by larger males. Nature is like that – everywhere you turn.
We’ve seen a tiny handful of 10.5 inch males that may suffer the same fate. The 11.5 & 12 inch males will probably fluff up and grow into size limit.
That’s the difference.
When the size limit was 9/10/11 inches every male we put back (even a thousand somedays during the late 1990s) ..and all would survive to spawn the entire summer – perhaps even another year.
Repetitive, I know. One day I hope to see it used. I absolutely guarantee we could take sea bass to habitat capacity again.
Would that happen we’d actually need to keep more. Meanwhile a lot of large, toothy critters would also feast on their abundance.
I was amazed to read of a study off our coast using sound and locator tags that showed bottlenose dolphin using echolocation at night to feast on sea bass.. I’d have never guessed. Will have to go back and give that a thorough study.
But for sea bass management? In 2015 we had the worst sea bass fishing in OC’s history. I’m pretty sure management will allow our region to revisit that low rather than use experience to drive them upward.
Regards
Monty
