Posted on July 15th, 2024
Hit the above vid for the crazy final day of scales shake up at the Ocean City Tuna Tournament!
The weather has gotten hot and humid again and it’s a chore eyen being outside for long if you ask me. It’s usually cooler on the water so that’s where lots of folks are heading to do some fishing.
Captain Jason Mumford of Lucky Break had a good afternoon for his folks putting them on a keeper flounder, some bluefish and a pile of spot.
Captain Dave Caffrey of On the Run had a nice afternoon with a couple of keeper flounder for his anglers.
Anglers fishing on the Angler with Captain Chris Mizurak saw a little better fishing today with some nice sea bass and flounder up to 5 or so pounds.
Captain Monty Hawkins of the Morning Star has found a couple of good spots for sea bass and his folks are hauling up some very nice fish.
Ahhh, the day after..
Big event now past & winners of the tuna tournament posted; nothing remains save taking down the giant tent and getting the offshore fleet back to charter fishing.
For us? Easier to park is all!
Had a couple fellows miss the boat this morning. Hope they had a good time last night. While I prefer to leave around 6:30/6:40, we waited on em til 7.
Clearing the inlet, the ocean seemed vibrant, alive in a light summer southerly wind. Annie & Mr Roll Tide himself, Mike, pushed a short stack of blocks over at Bobbys Reef; we again held course for the east.
Yesterday most clients had done well, but several were red hot. Matt even had a super rare cbass limit entirely on the jig. (Not an accident. He’s really good at it.)
I was ready for some more of that today!
Yeah No.
I somehow mistook “vibrant and alive” where ‘sullen and stingy’ were more appropriate. At least not where I started.
We would go on to slog it out – working for each fish.
Sea bass bit better later. Anne took the pool money today. Pushed well into overtime in hopes clients might have company for dinner. Some did, too.. Folks can go on and on about camaraderie’s importance to a day of fishing – and it is. But in my business a day that doesn’t end doing dishes wasn’t much of a day at all.
Did catch some more mahi. They weren’t for dinner. MicroMahi doesn’t really imply how small they were. Threw em back. I’ll have to look up ‘age at length’ in mahi. Were these little fellows just weeks old? I think so.
Beginning to spawn at just three months, mahi are the poster child for spawning young and thereby maintaining abundance despite extraction. They’re so abundant in the pacific there’s no commercial or recreational creel limit.
I so wish we could have such thinking applied to sea bass – not regulation free, but have managers investigate what I’ve seen for quite nearly two decades — we can force sea bass to spawn young too
..or, as we do today, force them to delay spawning until they’re age 3 or 4…
With mahi even super-green dot.orgs practically drool over the mahi fishery’s sustainability. “They spawn so young!”
With sea bass? Everyone’s focused on NOAA’s outrageous catch estimates. “Look at those greedy outboards catching more than all trawl/trap/party & charter”. . . (We’re always and forever accused of catch that could never have happened!) ..so regulation grows tighter which forces spawning production to decrease at each turn of regulation’s rack.
Guarantee – management itself is the biggest enemy of sea bass today. They were far more abundant when we only had kitchen table regs in the early/mid 1990s than now. Despite our tightest regs since the emergency sea bass closure? Fewer fish.
I wish I was kidding.
By lowering the 13 in size limit (age 3 or 4 cbass) to just 11 inches (late age 2) I think we’d force many age one and all age two cbass into the nearshore reef’s spawning population.
From there?
Abundance.
Why can’t we experiment?
Because recreational catch estimates show wholly unbelievable catches by private boats. There isn’t anyone left who actually believes the data. But, the law says use it. We must therefore be ‘controlled’…
Talk about a catch 22.
Been driving me nuts since 2004. Figured it out in 2006.
In 2003 I carried 25 clients a trip (not today’s 18). Those anglers limited out at 25 sea bass per person (not today’s 15) with a 12 inch size limit for more days than not across 9 months.
All the fish they caught back then had been spawned with only 9/10/11 inch size limits and no creel/bag limit.
Between 1993 & 2002 we’d catch as hard as we could – yet the following year there’d be more sea bass.
When production exceeds extraction? Abundance. When exponential production is maintained? Jumbos become abundant.
Promise: with an emphasis on habitat construction and restoration; plus using spawning biology to drive success, we could create a larger sea bass population than has ever existed.
Ever.
Promise.
Cheers,
Monty
Josh Price had a nice keeper flounder and Brian caught his first ever bluefish at the route 50 bridge this afternoon.
