The MidAtlantic Day 1

By Scott Lenox

Posted on August 21st, 2017

Today was day 1 of the 26th Annual MidAtlantic Tournament based in Cape May, NJ with weigh stations at the Canyon Club Resort and Marina in Cape May and at Sunset Marina in Ocean City, MD. There are a total of 151 boats fishing this year’s MidAtlantic and they are looking for their share of over $3.2 Million in prize money. It was a pretty busy day at both scales today with 61 boats fishing out of Cape May, NJ and 83 boats fishing out of Ocean City, MD. There fish that hit the leaderboard in every category except blue marlin and there were several billfish released today. Here’s what the leaderboard looks like after 1 day of fishing.

Heaviest Wahoo

Contrail 67 Pounds

Heaviest Dolphin

Ditch Digger 16 Pounds

Heaviest Tuna

2nd Place Tie Viking 62 70 Pounds

2nd Place Tie D. A. Sea 70 Pounds

1st Place Viking 62 72 Pounds

Heaviest White Marlin

1st Place Taylor Jean 72 Pounds

Dan Burt caught a nice 67 pound tuna that hit the scale at Sunset Marina today caught aboard his Pumpin’ Hard.

The crew of Rhonda’s Osprey fresh off of their Poor Girls Open win had a good day of trolling for the first day of the MidAtlantic. Captain Joe Drosey put his anglers on two white marlin releases and a blue marlin release.

Karen Langford Kelly was all alone today being that her fiance’ Captain Jeff Coats of Pitboss Fishing was fishing offshore with our friends from the Reel Estate, but that didn’t stop her from heading 20 miles off the beach in the Bad Influence by herself to get some fishing in. Karen did awesome catching a couple of gaffer mahi weighing 13 and 14 pounds……solo!

I got an awesome text from my buddy Randy Swain with the below picture of two HUGE doormat flounder. Randy fished the Paradise Grille flounder tournament this weekend and caught a 9.5 pound flounder and Russ Coward caught a 9.9 pound flounder. The guys won 3rd place heaviest fish and 2nd place total weight and a check for $24,200!!

There was some decent flounder fishing in the back bays today on the high tide. Captain Mike Giardina of the Calico Jack put this angler on a nice keeper flounder on today’s trip.

Captain Drew Zerbe of the Tortuga had some luck on this mornings trip putting a couple of keeper in the box for some lucky fish pool winners.

Bear down at the Oceanic Pier sent me a text this morning with a couple of pics of some nice flounder that he and John from Baltimore and his son Joshua caught today. Bear had a nice 22″ keeper and Joshua had a 17″ keeper.

Captain Marc Spagnola of Dusk to Dawn Bowfishing had some crazy good shooting for his clients today. Captain Marc put his shooters on some good cow nosed ray action and a couple of big southern rays that weighed out at 84 and 110 pounds!

Bobby Thomas hit me with a Facebook message today with a shot of some shark action that he had while fishing the beach on Assateague Island over the weekend.’