Striper Talk Striped Bass Fishing, Surfcasting, Boating

Liam and I were watching the birds at the end of the street last night (he makes a "spfffft" - rasberry noise when he sees them) when the fog rolled in last night, thick & quick. Shortly afterwards, I started seeing the casual bay boat fishermen bringing their boats very close to shore. I say "casual bay boat fishermen" because they were typically mid twenty foot express style cabin boats with rods bungie-corded to the canvas top rigging and not more of a fishing boat with rod holders and such (I was almost one of them over a decade ago :rolleyes: ).

Again, when the fog rolled in, so did the boats. The first few seemed to hug the shoreline as they headed south to Warwick Light. Well, a 22 foot cuddy style fun boat took this same route around 7pm last night but managed to crusie in 50 feet more than it should have. There's a ledge that sits just a few inches below the surface around high tide and this was just about that time - Clammer can probably tell you a few stories about that ledge. At 20 knots or so, this boat hit it dead on. I had looked away for a moment when my son started wiggling in my arms but the sound of the boat whacking the ledge was pretty loud.

The boat was stopped, motor running for about 10 minutes or so and it didn't appear to be taking on water. But they at MINIMUM did some damage to the outdrive. Several times it looked like he tried to get it up on plane quickly but it just wasn't making it. He eventually got it up onto a slow plane and made it out of the area... Meanwhile, I was waiting on whether I'd need to call it in if this guy started taking on water...

Anyway - boat safe please.... I'm too old and fat to swim out there and help out...