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Last
month I took part in the Pink Squid Yacht Club Bass/Blues Charity
Tournament to benefit Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Martha's
Vineyard. The tournament ran
from 12:00am Friday to 4:30pm Saturday.
Having participated in many tournaments in the past without much
success I was completely on board with Capt TW’s aggressive game plan to
fish the entire tournament from start to finish.
We
left
Cape Cod
Friday afternoon and stopped halfway across the Nantucket Sound to catch
some scup for bait. While
fishing for scup (porgies) we caught and released plenty of small fluke, sea bass,
and Tautog as well. In about a
half hour we had filled the live well and headed on to MV.
We arrived in Edgartown around 5:00pm and after dropping off our
gear at the hotel we went out to grab some dinner. After dinner and a few
drinks we decided to head back to the hotel to get some sleep before
leaving the dock. After closing my eyes for what felt like 5 seconds we
were up and headed down to the dock to take off.
We left at about 11:00pm in pitch black darkness.
It
started drizzling once we left the harbor and the fog got increasingly
worse as we headed down to the
Elizabethan
Islands
. Because of the weather and
the fact that is was close to midnight we had to navigate completely by
GPS and radar. It took us
about an hour to get to the spot where we wanted to start fishing.
At around 12:05 we dropped a smorgasbord of bait in hopes of
catching a giant cow. We tried
eels, scup, crabs, and also tried dragging some parachute jigs.
Nothing worked and it turned out to be a pretty long night.
Leaving the
harbor |
Coming back in |
Once
the sun came up we headed to a new location and started trolling some
parachute jigs. At around
8:00am RB hooked up first and pulled in a nice 15-16 pound fish.
Within a few minutes of his fish hitting the deck, I hooked up with
a similar size fish. We kept
trolling a while longer with no results so we decided to move on to the
next spot.
As we were driving East we noticed a
flock of birds working over some fish.
Thinking they were bluefish, we decided to head over and try to get
in a winner in that category. We
threw some poppers out but had no luck and couldn’t figure out why they
were not biting. Then, as RB
was reeling in his popper a 16lb bass jumped clear out of the water and
hit it! The schools we were
chasing were all striped bass, not bluefish! RB
fought the big bass on a small spinning rod which turned out to be a great
fight. We chased the school
for a while longer but eventually they just disappeared.
JH with bass |
MM with bass |
We stopped one last time on our way back to Edgartown and dragged
some parachute jigs which produced a small 28”-29” bass and a 6lb bluefish.
While trolling we saw some small boats working the rips closer
to shore in about 5 feet of water. We
headed towards them to see what all the commotion was about.
Looking into the crystal clear water you could see it was filled
with sand eels and squid. Then
as we looked around we saw huge bass crashing through the rips and
devouring the bait! We grabbed
the spinning rods and went to work. We
tried every popper and jig that we had on the boat but they would not bite.
It was frustrating to see so many bass in one spot and be unable to
catch them. It was still a pretty amazing site!
Eventually TW was able to hook a small 28” fish with a Ron-Zi
lure but that would be the only one we would net.
We ended up getting back to Edgartown with 4 bass and 1 blue in the
cooler. The tournament winning
bass was around 27lbs and the winning blue was over 10lbs.
We were not close to winning but had a respectable showing and
great time fishing. The PSYC
did a nice job with the tourney and it made me psyched for our upcoming
tournaments. You can’t beat
fishing with friends for a good cause.
-JH
Bucket O fish |
PSYC 2008 |
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