June 23rd - UDL - Atlantic Ocean

[StriperZ]

I checked about 6 places on the way to where I found a mother load of 36-42″ fish. I launched at an hour after sunrise. The ride out was peaceful with a light rain. The water laid down after the blow overnight and early AM.

On my way to the mother load, I was able to catch a fish at each location. While they were keepers, they were smaller than the mother load. I took all of them with poppers and the magic swimmer. My bet is that there were bigger bass down below, but my surface fun only attracted the smaller ones. A location that I refer to as "Damien's Pride and Mike's Shame" held the smallest bass. "Last Night's Starfish" was also productive, bigger bass, so the move north was called for. A new flag was flown on a buoy, so I have a new location, "Pitching and Catching". The bass were slightly bigger. I decided here to try some jigs and drop to the bottom, got fish, but not much bigger, up to 32″. The other three spots have no names, so UDL will have to do. Same size, about 32″.

I allowed the drift to carry the boat and found the mother load in deeper water. 40-60 feet of water with fish throughout the water column. The sebile swimmer was producing bass. I hit about 6 bass with it. It is a surface swimmer. The fish were about 36″, they felt bigger than the others. On the last bass, the swallow caused a major bleeder, so dinner tonight would be striped bass. I continued casting the swimmer, and got no bass to take it, even though I could feel and see them nailing the lure. To catch fish on any lure you have to have a hook. I retired it.

The other surface lures produced nice fish. I switched to jigging with a sluggo. I used Nor-Easter's technique and blam, the big fish were down on the bottom. Cast it out to the other side of the school, let it sink, then wait some more, and then a slow retrieve with a couple light twitches to keep it near the bottom. Big bass each cast after I moved back to the school. One cast per drift, as the speed was now 1.5 knots. Here are the two best pictures

This guy was swimming in midair, snapping on my thumb.

If I grabbed him, he flipped out. When I didn't touch him, he just lied there. So this is the pic. The first was the biggest.

Then the bite just died. The mother load was still there, but I could not get them to bite, I finally looked behind me and took these pics. At least I knew why the fish got lockjaw.

10 seals killed the bite.

All in all a fun morning.

[golden]

horseheads....ugh!