BassyiusMaximus
06-30-2008, 10:25 AM
I spent this past spring taking some time to cruise shorelines/bays and coves that I would think would have good bass prowling around at night and I would consider the tides/currents and the wind for likely places where I could anchor before nightfall and toss my lures/bait for bass, my research has paid off well and I have a plethora of spots now to try this season depending on the conditions. Truth be told, I have almost no clue about moon phases or how the tides work, I'm the one that always just goes out and sees how it goes and it usually works out as if there are fish, there are fish, it is why I love the threads about whether it is the spot or the fisherman and whether boat fishing or shore fishing is easier, great information and points of view all.
This past Friday evening, my fiance and I got all the stuff together and off we went to one of the likely spots I knew should hold bass on this calm, moonless, humid, off and on light showers night on Friday. I anchored up in about 12' of water and even had to put out a small stern anchor to keep the boat in the perfect spot so we'd be able to cast 180-degrees off the stern of the boat or to either side of the boat. The wind and the tide change were pushing me off by about 40-50' at times so once we'd drift back to where I wanted to stay, I dropped the small "beaching" anchor I keep in a milkcrate in one of my big bow storage spaces.
The evening started off like it usually does for me with us tossing lures and with us hooking up with all manner of monster bluefish and this evening was no different. Sometimes I wonder if I should be stressing the new/relatively new spooling of Ande 12lb test I put on all my light 40-series reels with blues, but what the heck, it is only fishing line and some days when trolling for the bonito, we catch upwards of 20-40 bluefish/bonito and the line never breaks so we get it done, not to mention, there has not been a steel leader on my boat in years, somehow the fish are never blitzing so much that there are open mouths in the water just chopping like velociraptors on humans in tall grass (can you tell I watched The Lost World on TV last night?). It was down in Great South Bay LI where I was last cut off during a ferocious bluefish blitz a year ago, but nothing up here ever really gets me/us somehow while bluefishing, which is good, but I digress.
The bluefish are great fun, from 4-9lb fish and I swear the ceramic drags on my Quantums get smoother with each and every fish along with the new Penn AF4000 I bought and have been loving even though it is a Ryobi reel from what I have read, but bent over double light-inshore rods and tiny screaming reels are good fun, especially when my fiance' loves to catch fish by casting, the good thing about her is whenever we are bottom fishing somewhere, she will ask if she can cast and I let her know that yes, she can cast anytime she wants while we are bottom fishing. She just loves to do it like my 6 year old nephew, he will cast anywhere at anytime, it is what keeps us all interested, the hope that something might bite and pull.
Later on, once we are tired from pulling in the blues and we take a break right before the sunset, and I check the first few feet of line and cut down the parts that might be chafed from the fish, we get ready to toss the small harbor pollock eel-style, that we managed to jig up on sabiki's earlier in the day. It was not until I was sightseeing one afternoon that I even knew that there were those things near me, I have caught them all over N. MA, but none where I'm at till just this past week, so we got about 15 of them and I hook them like I do live eels and we set to tossing them all about the boat in the near darkness.
My girl has a hard time at first as she feels like every tug from the fish is a big fish so I tell her to wait for the big one and that sometimes when the small fish is getting really skittish/scared to death from a big fish coming to eat it, she'll know when one is on. She fished eels with me once or twice last season and got the feel of how to both lob the live bait and waitning and setting up on the big fish that come out to eat. Only last season we were into 24-28" fish and not the 31"+ fish we were surrounded by tonight.
Meanwhile, I get a couple of big tugs and I'm tight. The hookup feels good and the quick, steady long pull feels like bass, but when I get it near the boat after a good tussle and I can see the big white belly flashes from the fish swirling in the water, splishing and splashing in my headlamp, I realize it is a big old sand shark, anyone else feel the take and the fight of these things is exactly like the bass'?
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a184/thundra04struck/SharkdeckDusky.jpg
No problem, I've people at work that like to eat the sharks I give them, whether they fry them up or stew them in some sort of sauce, they love them. I even see them for sale in Chinatown for $2.95 lb.
Every now and then we will pick up weed on our hooks/swivels so I'll flick on my headlamp and clear the weed off. Me lady mocks my headlamp but like I knew would happen, she is constantly asking me for my light so I think I'll get her a light she can clip on the brim of her ballcap she wears so she can stop bugging me. After a while, I tell her to check her fish for weeds but she is in the middle of a cast and lobs her fish out not 20' from the boat and the whole time I'm thinking, 'One, she probably has weed on her hook and two, her casts are not far enough to get into the fish but not a minute later she wispers and I see her setting the hook and she says in a hushed voice, "I got one", she is good at being quiet as I tell her that we'll scare all the fish away if we bang about and talk too loud so like hunters, we whisper and concentrate, her reel is singing and the rod is bent over. 'Nice' I think, she is on her first keeper bass.
On her first cast, the bait swam down to the bottom and we had to cut the line as the bait/hook was snagged. She got her first pickup but the fish ran hard and had to have looped her around the boulders as she is still new to fishing the boulderfields, never mind at night, and besides, which of us never gets snagged when fishing the rocks, so she is not as well versed on how to sort of steer the fish up and away from the boulders and I don't tell her what to do because it just rattles her a bit so I let her make her mistakesa nd I know better than to ever talk to or give advice to someone while they are on a fish as hard as it is not to. It is just always painful to see those almost $1 B/B barrel swivels, 18-20" of florocarbon leader and 5/0-6/0 Gamakatsu hooks disappear along with the line on the reel, but that is fishing and is constantly replaceable. The hardest part for me is when I grab hold of the mono and tug and feel the pull of the fish on the other end of the line but can't budge it because somehow it is pinched under some rock or boulder, oh well.
She takes her time and relishes the fight and upon the first glimpse we can see of it with my headlamp, I see that dark top shape and know it is not a shark but her first keeper bass at night. Afterwards, I get my first bass of the night as it hauls and hauls good and feeling that little 40 series reel peel out line smoothly along with seeing and feeling the fast taper 7' rod bending over to the fish, all is well with the night as the breeze picks up from the west just a bit but the water stays calm for the ride home. All in all, by 10:30pm, we are both tired as it was our first night bass trip of the season and as I've this Wednesday-Sunday off along with 21 days of vacation saved up, I'll sure be out hooking more till July is done and August rolls around.
Here are some fish laid out on my bracket before I bag them and refrigerate them for the night, too tired to do anything with them now. I don't like the taste of the bass but many like to eat them so I make the people happy and steak all the fish up to give away.
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a184/thundra04struck/BracketfishII.jpg
And this concludes the first night-bass outing of 2008.
This past Friday evening, my fiance and I got all the stuff together and off we went to one of the likely spots I knew should hold bass on this calm, moonless, humid, off and on light showers night on Friday. I anchored up in about 12' of water and even had to put out a small stern anchor to keep the boat in the perfect spot so we'd be able to cast 180-degrees off the stern of the boat or to either side of the boat. The wind and the tide change were pushing me off by about 40-50' at times so once we'd drift back to where I wanted to stay, I dropped the small "beaching" anchor I keep in a milkcrate in one of my big bow storage spaces.
The evening started off like it usually does for me with us tossing lures and with us hooking up with all manner of monster bluefish and this evening was no different. Sometimes I wonder if I should be stressing the new/relatively new spooling of Ande 12lb test I put on all my light 40-series reels with blues, but what the heck, it is only fishing line and some days when trolling for the bonito, we catch upwards of 20-40 bluefish/bonito and the line never breaks so we get it done, not to mention, there has not been a steel leader on my boat in years, somehow the fish are never blitzing so much that there are open mouths in the water just chopping like velociraptors on humans in tall grass (can you tell I watched The Lost World on TV last night?). It was down in Great South Bay LI where I was last cut off during a ferocious bluefish blitz a year ago, but nothing up here ever really gets me/us somehow while bluefishing, which is good, but I digress.
The bluefish are great fun, from 4-9lb fish and I swear the ceramic drags on my Quantums get smoother with each and every fish along with the new Penn AF4000 I bought and have been loving even though it is a Ryobi reel from what I have read, but bent over double light-inshore rods and tiny screaming reels are good fun, especially when my fiance' loves to catch fish by casting, the good thing about her is whenever we are bottom fishing somewhere, she will ask if she can cast and I let her know that yes, she can cast anytime she wants while we are bottom fishing. She just loves to do it like my 6 year old nephew, he will cast anywhere at anytime, it is what keeps us all interested, the hope that something might bite and pull.
Later on, once we are tired from pulling in the blues and we take a break right before the sunset, and I check the first few feet of line and cut down the parts that might be chafed from the fish, we get ready to toss the small harbor pollock eel-style, that we managed to jig up on sabiki's earlier in the day. It was not until I was sightseeing one afternoon that I even knew that there were those things near me, I have caught them all over N. MA, but none where I'm at till just this past week, so we got about 15 of them and I hook them like I do live eels and we set to tossing them all about the boat in the near darkness.
My girl has a hard time at first as she feels like every tug from the fish is a big fish so I tell her to wait for the big one and that sometimes when the small fish is getting really skittish/scared to death from a big fish coming to eat it, she'll know when one is on. She fished eels with me once or twice last season and got the feel of how to both lob the live bait and waitning and setting up on the big fish that come out to eat. Only last season we were into 24-28" fish and not the 31"+ fish we were surrounded by tonight.
Meanwhile, I get a couple of big tugs and I'm tight. The hookup feels good and the quick, steady long pull feels like bass, but when I get it near the boat after a good tussle and I can see the big white belly flashes from the fish swirling in the water, splishing and splashing in my headlamp, I realize it is a big old sand shark, anyone else feel the take and the fight of these things is exactly like the bass'?
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a184/thundra04struck/SharkdeckDusky.jpg
No problem, I've people at work that like to eat the sharks I give them, whether they fry them up or stew them in some sort of sauce, they love them. I even see them for sale in Chinatown for $2.95 lb.
Every now and then we will pick up weed on our hooks/swivels so I'll flick on my headlamp and clear the weed off. Me lady mocks my headlamp but like I knew would happen, she is constantly asking me for my light so I think I'll get her a light she can clip on the brim of her ballcap she wears so she can stop bugging me. After a while, I tell her to check her fish for weeds but she is in the middle of a cast and lobs her fish out not 20' from the boat and the whole time I'm thinking, 'One, she probably has weed on her hook and two, her casts are not far enough to get into the fish but not a minute later she wispers and I see her setting the hook and she says in a hushed voice, "I got one", she is good at being quiet as I tell her that we'll scare all the fish away if we bang about and talk too loud so like hunters, we whisper and concentrate, her reel is singing and the rod is bent over. 'Nice' I think, she is on her first keeper bass.
On her first cast, the bait swam down to the bottom and we had to cut the line as the bait/hook was snagged. She got her first pickup but the fish ran hard and had to have looped her around the boulders as she is still new to fishing the boulderfields, never mind at night, and besides, which of us never gets snagged when fishing the rocks, so she is not as well versed on how to sort of steer the fish up and away from the boulders and I don't tell her what to do because it just rattles her a bit so I let her make her mistakesa nd I know better than to ever talk to or give advice to someone while they are on a fish as hard as it is not to. It is just always painful to see those almost $1 B/B barrel swivels, 18-20" of florocarbon leader and 5/0-6/0 Gamakatsu hooks disappear along with the line on the reel, but that is fishing and is constantly replaceable. The hardest part for me is when I grab hold of the mono and tug and feel the pull of the fish on the other end of the line but can't budge it because somehow it is pinched under some rock or boulder, oh well.
She takes her time and relishes the fight and upon the first glimpse we can see of it with my headlamp, I see that dark top shape and know it is not a shark but her first keeper bass at night. Afterwards, I get my first bass of the night as it hauls and hauls good and feeling that little 40 series reel peel out line smoothly along with seeing and feeling the fast taper 7' rod bending over to the fish, all is well with the night as the breeze picks up from the west just a bit but the water stays calm for the ride home. All in all, by 10:30pm, we are both tired as it was our first night bass trip of the season and as I've this Wednesday-Sunday off along with 21 days of vacation saved up, I'll sure be out hooking more till July is done and August rolls around.
Here are some fish laid out on my bracket before I bag them and refrigerate them for the night, too tired to do anything with them now. I don't like the taste of the bass but many like to eat them so I make the people happy and steak all the fish up to give away.
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a184/thundra04struck/BracketfishII.jpg
And this concludes the first night-bass outing of 2008.