Posted on July 30th, 2024
Check out the epic marlin fishing from the weekend in the Daily Catch at Sunset Marina!
We’ve had to deal with the wind for a couple of days now, but it’s been sunny with no rain so it hasn’t been too terrible. Hopefully the marlin bite is still hot when boats head out for this weekend’s Marlins for Mason and Heels n’ Reels Tournaments.
This crew fishing on Boss Hogg had an awesome day out in the canyon with a pile of yellowfin tuna and three white marlin releases.
Captain Mike Burt and the crew of the Pumpin’ Hard had a nice Big Fish Classic this past weekend with four white marlin releases and some yellowfin tuna.
Capitan Monty Hawkins of the Morning Star had a good catch of sea bass for his folks today.
Less starch in local flags implied better sea conditions off the beach this day – and they were.
When Lauren and son Luke gave today’s reef pyramids a shove over Pete Maugans’ Memorial Reef winds were at 13.8 kts.
Same exact forecast yesterday found 23.8 knots in nearly the same place where today we witnessed 13.8..
Those ten knots made a big difference.
With a south wind you have to go see.
Fishing began with a drift (which I could not have hardly dared yesterday.) That drift was barely productive. Although we didn’t have even 50% play the pool (& thus refunded by the time we cleared sea buoy – the rarest of parties) ..it seemed as though there was skill aboard.
Not an epic bite – not half the tempo I had with just 6 aboard Sunday – but we worked from an anchor all day toward fish fries around. Almost made it too!
Around eleven am we had 16.5 knots. I became concerned with this steady increase in wind
..but needn’t have.
At noon we had 12.8 knots with a shift more to the south. The ocean became much calmer.
I’ll take it.
We had lots of reeling – throwbacks – some keepers. Though Benjamin had the biggest; two youthful sharpshooters in the stern were high hook by far.
As with most days at sea, I was left wondering, “What if NOAA and Fed/State Fishery management concerned themselves – not with catch estimates they absolutely know are untrue – but with How To Make More Fish.”
Man.. The ocean we could have.
To that end I’ve included yet another old email to management from spring of 2014. I had an inkling how bad it was going to be back then in and anywhere within 7 miles of the MD Wind Energy Area before it got truly terrible – by mid 2014 the WEA was entirely vacated by cbass and summer flounder owing subbottom profiler noise. Those soundings killed nothing – yet they drove bottlenose dolphin and most fish away.
Following on, in late summer 2015 & all of 2016 I wrote many times predicting a massive population increase as age one sea bass spawning resumed. That too came to be.
Sure was fun for 6 years or so – economically productive too.
You’d almost think it was more than luck; you know, me making predictions of sea bass populations years in advance that are always spot on.
Believe me, management cannot see an absolute explosion of sea bass when every commercial and recreational angler tells em it’s happening.
They do perfectly see an illusion of overfishing by Private Boats worse than foreign factory trawl of 1974 though. They see how Private Boats of one state can outfish ALL Party/Charter & Commercial from VA to MA.
And it’s never happened.
Though these accusations of overfishing by MRIP recreational catch estimate could never be true, some states have as low as a one fish limit in summer – NJ right now for instance. That’s 100% because of bad catch estimates and nothing else.
No Other Reason At All.
And NOAA doesn’t believe their own work, let alone the many in state management who hate having to use data the KNOW is baloney.
“But it’s all we have so we HAVE to use it.”
Were NOAA & Management to do an examination of sea bass including ONLY captain submitted catch data & scientific trawl data, they would create plausible population estimates – they’d have to absolutely NOT Include MRIP/MRFSS rec catch estimates.
I’m sure truth would send management in a better direction. That’s how science works..
Believe me – Fishery management combined with sea floor habitat improvement/restoration would be an incredibly powerful force
..and it’s sidelined because they include recreational data fully understood to be nonsense in population (stock) estimates and division of quotas.
It really is true that in 2003 I wrote we were at Habitat Capacity with sea bass..
Now?
What a shame.
