"Sleeping on Turtle Gut" by Alexi

     Going out for an adventure, or going out to catch fish?  Having a good time with friends or suffering?  Only thing is, the answers are never as straightforward as the questions.  Disappointment is based on expectations.  So that's why I always start with "what we set out to do" and relate it to "what we accomplished".  After all, you don't go out to catch Fluke in April.
    This was another overnight camp-out in the Sedges (this time N.Wildwood). A Long Johns trip.  That's Steve, KGB and I.   We tried to fish the area around Nummy Island for the second time.   This, of course, includes a stop at the Kayak Fishing Store.
     We were already pretty pumped up thinking we'd get into some bigger stripers and maybe even some weakfish.  Chris, at the store, is also very good at encouraging the angler, mentioning to us that there are even some redfish being caught.  So, after we bought some new gear from his shop we were triply amped.  We went to look at the ocean launch (as per Chris' suggestion) and decided that all three of us were not prepared  to spend the day safely floating in the ocean, so we stuck to our original plan and launched by the kayak shop, just as we had done last year when we were skunked.
         It was a slow start.  KGB had the first fish, a small blue on T-n-W.  We were all pretty much dedicated to trolling around our tubes for the whole time.  (24 hrs of paddling)  Eventually we all had at least one small bluefish on T-n-W, and Steve and I each had a small bass, but at the end of the day it was slow.  I got mine on a lure I really detest in many ways, the pink Fin-s.

24" on my light set-up was a nice fight

     We, however, were still hopeful.  After all, night time is the right time for bass and weakfish.  We trolled along many of the sedges, mostly along the deep water drop offs where fish should have been.  We have many theories why we didn't catch more fish during the day, one being that we were sticking to the sedges near open water, and maybe we should have travelled up some of the smaller creeks.
  

steve fights a blue

We thought that our luck would turn after the sun set, but none of us caught anything after dark.  This was very strange to us.  We are used to catching more Striped Bass at night, and bigger ones, and all we could do was keep trying until we were way too tired to even stand.  So eventually, and I mean eventually we passed out.  We camped on (what I later found out from looking at NOAA charts) what is called Turtle Gut.  The ground was wet, my old tent is not longer water resistant on the bottom, and the birds were LOUD.

    The next morning the water was a mess.  Because it's a new moon and the tides are as extreme as they are going to be, there was lots of detritus in the water (it was also full of tide grass the night before, and we thought that's why we weren't catching any fish...). So we fished most of the morning.  We tried heading more towards the inlet thinking that we would at least catch a few blues, but alas all three of us were skunked.   We called it quits as I had to work that night on about three hours of bird-squawk non-sleep.

     As we were packing a member of the kayak fishing store pro staff team was pulling up, and he had a keeper and many shorts and blues, just that morning from 7 to noon.  So all of our theories about the fish and the conditions being the problem were shot out the window.  AND he caught his fish trolling tube-n- worm along the sedges!   So were we just unlucky?  Or, more likely, does he know that area like we know our little corner of Barnegat Bay? 

     We gave that area around of N.Wildwood around Nummy Island our best, and we feel like it was a complete failure, but was it?  Personally I feel like I want to return to find where the fish are, because I know they should be there in big numbers this time of year.