My Biggest Bass So Far This Spring, by Alexi

Tuesday Day-Fish
Tuesday Night- Fish
Wednesday Day- Fish
Wednesday Night - Fish 'til midnight
Thursday Day - Break (nap)
Thursday Night - Fish
Friday Morning - Fish
  
A whole lot of fishing has gone on between me and Steve over the past four or five days.  I may not be in my kayak right now, but I feel like I am.  I feel like everything around me is undulating like the bay. In fact I just now realized that it was this morning I was tagging an 18" fish in Snake Ditch.  But I'll get to that later.  I suppose it would be easier for my story to be in chronological order.
     To be fair there were two separate fishing trips.  One was a two day where we camped out, and the other was just a night-time meeting with a cow who never showed up.  The first trip did help precipitate the second.
   Tuesday May 21 2013 we left my house with a plan.  To find bigger fish than we had thus far this spring.  We were both prepared to surf launch, bay fish, and jetty/ surf fish if need be.  The plan was to look at a few spots for surf launching into bunker pods, only if we saw them.  We didn't.  We checked in about three spots, and decided to head to the bay and to the buoys at oyster creek channel, which from now on I will be calling 'Seal Island'.  We had picked up some eels on the way.
    I don't really know how it happens, but no matter how ill-prepared I am I am usually the first one done preparing my gear and kayak for the day.  This day was no different, and so while I was waiting for Steve to be ready I waded into the water and on my second cast caught about a 20"blue on a pink fin-s. A good start.  We were pretty much trolling around the usual spots, Sedge House, along all of the Sedges inside, then out, with fairly slow but consistent action on small bass and blues.  Steve was catching more short bass than he could  count by the end of the trip.  Tuesday night we ended up near the southern end of Snake Ditch which from now on will be referred to on this blog as 'Weakfish Point'.  I arrived there first, and hooked into a 27" bass on a live eel.  It had some strange lice on its tail, and red  areas on its side, so I decided not to tag it as it seemed stressed out already.  We were tired and camped out in the sand which was very comfortable.

     The next morning (Wed) we split up.  Steve went back towards Seal island and caught a million short bass while I stayed and trolled tube-n-worm up and down Snake Ditch.  I had one short.  By the time I was back in radio range to communicate with Steve he said he was really getting into the short bass. I immediately made my way against the current to Seal Island.  It was less trouble than I thought getting there, but once there I noticed quite a different scene than the one I was just at.  There were several boats anchored and chumming in that area.  While we were taking a break and discussing our next move we noticed that one of the guys in a boat was bringing in a fish.  It looked big as he was really taking a long time in landing it. We joked about it.  Steve was eating and I said I wanted top go out and toss a live eel into the deep part of the water and see what happens.  Second toss I hook up with a BIG fish.  After having joked with Steve about how long that guy in the boat took to land his fish, here I was with a monster of a fish on my line.  At first it tugged like a big blue, so I assumed that's what it was.  I knew it was big. Then I saw its shadow and knew it was a bass.  It sounded a few times as it dragged me towards an anchored boat...(I should have put my feet in the water as a break, but in the moment I had forgotten about that technique)...   I finally got her in the boat and she was a very girthy 34.5" 17.5lb bass.
   

  We continued to fish that area, but more boats showed up to the point where I felt like I was having a party.  I tried inviting Steve over to my party, but instead we paddled through a short-cut to Weakfish Point. (this may have been our big mistake of the trip.  After-all why leave so soon after catching a decent fish? just because there are lots of boats around?)
     Once at Weakfish Point we had some small blues pestering us.  We slowly made our way to the launch, to Grumpy's.
     The question was, with about half the day left, where can we go to get into some big fish.  The answer we came up with was... the South Jetty.
     And so we went to the South Jetty for some night-time eel fishing.  We had with us some eel rigging gear and some dead eels, so while waiting for the sun to set we made some eel puppets.

Everything was perfect except the wind.   It was really hard from the south, which meant we couldn't really fish the pocket.  After a few hours of brutal conditions, we conceded and went home.


     The next day I was looking at the wind predictions and noticed a small window Thursday night when the winds would be 4 or 5 mph.  Half serious/delirious I suggested we go out for a night-only trip.  Slack tide at the Sedges would be around 5 A.M.

    Thursday night:  We started fishing around 1:30 a.m.  Conditions were better than expected.  (I was having a little trouble with my gps but in the end it was only a distraction because the fog lifted quickly.  Less wind, little fog, a few showers.  Overcast, so no moon.  Really perfect, only we couldn't get the fish to bite.
     We fished until about 8 a.m. friday morning with tube and worm, and rigged eels.  We left with a few snapper blues for the fryer, and had each caught some short bass.  One of my blue fish spat this little guy up.

So, actually, you could say I landed both my biggest and smallest fish of the Spring so far.