Big Bluelines and lots of Goldens and Black Drum

Memorial Day Weekend Report
By Dr. Julie Ball 23-25 May 2008

New State Leading Blueline and Goldens

FRIDAY BLACKS (5/23): Memorial Day weekend was a great lead-in to the summer. Friday, the wind dropped out to nothing, so I wanted to zip out to the Eastern Shore to enjoy the evening on the water, and tag a few more black drum. We arrived about an hour or so prior to the tide change. We anchored south of Fisherman’s Island in about 18-20 feet of water near buoy 10. Not a whole lot of action going on, but we did manage 3 blacks on chowder clams, which I tagged. We again ended up near two of my buddy’s boats, so we had folks to chat with. They did about the same as we did. We were not targeting reds, so we left when the tide started running hard.

Click the images for a closer look.

SUNDAY DEEP DROPPING (5/25): Sunday was one of the first beautiful fishable days I had seen on a weekend in months, so we were going offshore to deep drop. Saturday, we attended Jake Hile’s lovely wedding, so we arranged our crew and fueled up the boat after the reception.

We left at 5:30 am from the Fishing Center with our crew of four, supplemented by Steve Kendall and Brett Swindell. Brett is the ‘fish print guy’ we all read about in the paper recently. We headed East at 30 knts with a 10-15 NW wind.

When we arrived near the Canyon, the water temperature was 61 degrees. It only took a few minutes of looking until we found the fish in 300 feet of water, and dropped right on their heads.

I immediately hooked up with something really big, but after a few pumps, my rig blew apart! What happened there? I re-rigged as I watched Steve pull up a nice blueline. I dropped back down, and hooked into another big one. This time I held my breath as the fish fought me all the way up. Up popped a mega-sized blueline, weighing in at 18lb 12 oz, the new 2008 state leader.

We were in the right place! Most everyone caught citation sized fish, with two over 17-pounds. Neither Steve nor Brett had ever caught a blueline before, and now Brett had plenty for his fish prints. We continued to bail big bluelines and nice seabass until we decided to reserve some limit slots for any golden tiles we may luck into.

We scooted over to the Canyon edge, and dropped down to about 600 feet where Steve hooked up to his biggest blueline tile at 17lb 5oz. We then moved on to the Canyon to about 160 fathoms, and began the 2 minute drop and the 10 minute retrieve to haul up “fish stick-sized” blackbelly rose fish. Brett and Steve thought we were crazy to work that hard for such little fish. They’ll know why soon enough! On one of my drops, I felt a different bite, and then it seemed I was snagged on the bottom. I wrestled the bottom until it moved, and 10-minutes later I was looking at a nice golden tile. That’ll work! We wore out Brett and Steve, but each one caught a golden tile, and I caught three. That’s a total of five goldens, paired with our 22 bluelines. We also had a nice mess of big seabass to over 5lbs, a few dozen rosies, a nice white hake, and two bluefish. That’s plenty, so we left.

We basically had the Canyon all to ourselves. We saw three boats all day! The ride in was pleasant and there were plenty of curious eyes back at the dock when we pulled in at 9pm. The fish box was so full of fish, the bow was sitting a foot low in the water. We couldn't even get half of the catch up on the board for a photo! We had a tired crew, but a day of firsts for our guests. Brett picked over the catch for specimens for his artwork. I can’t wait to see the results. We are not fishing on Monday, we are recovering.