CBBT January 23, 2012

January 23, 2012 CBBT report







I met an old friend from NC who trailered up from Raleigh to hit the CBBT. It’s about the same distance for him to the CBBT as it is to Oregon Inlet and since all the reports last week were excellent, even a blind person could find a gannet storm in the area. It’s a no brainer, right? Hit the Travelodge near Lynnhaven late Sunday night to get an early start on Monday morning. Initial price was around $50 but with taxes and an additional person we could have got three rooms at the place next to Rudee. We wanted to head out of Lynnhaven because the winds were supposed to switch to the south later in the afternoon with gusts up to 20mph, which isn’t pretty in a 19’ center console when you are in the ocean.







We had some battery issues in the morning and got kind of a late start. Heard from Walleye Pete that the action was decent around the bridge. Of course we missed the good morning bite around the islands by the time we finally made it there around 9am. We were forced to hit the pilings in deep water, like 60 feet. The first group of fish we found were hugging the bottom at 50 to 60 feet. My medium action rod didn’t have the ass needed to set the hook in that depth with the minimum required ounce. Quickly stepped up to the medium heavy avid, 4000 sedona spooled with 14 pound fireline on its 4^th season, 1.50z head and started hooking up regularly with 7 inch bass assassins and BKD’s. Most of the fish were dink, 20 inch category. Each fish was smothered with sea lice. After the first three fish the boat was painted in those things. Never seen anything like it. It must have something to do with bottom hugging fish. Usually sea lice is indicative of Ocean dwelling fish which relates to where we were catching our fish but I’ve pulled an anchor off the bottom in the Potomac and it was covered in those things.  I’ve just never seen so many parasites on the fish at the CBBT or anywhere else for that matter.  Next we worked towards the 3^rd but never made it that far. I wanted to fish a few pilings that have produced in the past and sure enough Captain Pete Dahlberg was working the same area. He’s got a triple hook up when we pass him. Same deal, fish were down very deep. 40 to 50 feet, some suspended down 30 to the bottom. The best method was to do a countdown figuring your jig was sinking 2 feet per second and a 12 count put you on fish well. Or two lifts of the rod with the bail open would put you somewhere in the 20 foot depth range, plus what ever the length of line you cast up current was. I was captaining the 19’ tidewater CC with a 115 HP Yami 4 stroke equipped with a Lawrance side imaging structure scan. Wow that thing is cool. Talk about being able to figure out exactly which pilings had fish. Even if the fish were hugging the piling, you could pick them off and determine which ones were worth fishing. Unbelievable unfair advantage. For whatever reason, on productive spots, only a few select pilings were holding good numbers of fish and it paid dividends being able to see exactly which ones had fish. Each drift would produce at least a strike, it was up to you to hook the strike. Between three guys we usually got a fish per drift. It’s not easy getting a good hook set when you’re fishing 40 to 60 feet deep while jigging with pastics. Many fish came unbuttoned or just never found a hook. A jigging spoon might have been better equipped to hook more fish but then you run the risk of losing an expensive jigging spoon over a cheap plastic to the sea of rip rap down below. Anyway, bright colored plastics got bit. Most of the fish were around 20 inches, a few might have pushed that 30 inch mark but no monsters. Most were as porky as can be. Well fed CBBT footballs who were all down deep.

Here’s an out of focus picture with the wrong camera settings. Most fish were this size or smaller which didn’t quite warrant a picture. But certainly a lot of fun and far better than watching a broom stick all afternoon. The funky pattern on the tail of this fish was all sea lice. There must have been over 100 sea lice on the tail alone. Then all over the deck of the boat too.

Check out the fog. This is the same fish as above. Try to zoom in on the tail and all the sea lice.

 Here's another schoolie size fish.  Notice the lice on the fins and the fog in the back ground.  We pretty much were forced to stick to the bridge without radar to watch out for other boats. 

We tried running the ocean a few times but the fog was so dense it was impossible. I doubt even the birds could see through the soup. With no radar I thought it would be a death sentence to join the fleet at Cape Henry. But miraculously once or twice during the day the fog would lift. The first time it did we tried making the run. Only to have a destroyer ship move in from the west and a Carrier come in from sea at the same time. It was pretty awesome to see what the air horns were advertising as the floating fortresses suddenly appeared out of the fog. But right around this time a group of gannets started to organize. Then hundreds of Cormorants started to all gather in the same area, one or two dive bombs from gannets turned into rapid fire. All this was right smack in the middle of the shipping channel and any minute we were about to be overrun with a billion tons of steel that would almost certainly scatter the fish. We darted in there like cuckoo bird laying its egg to scan the area for predators hiding below. It wasn’t meant to be I guess, it was just a huge school of bait with no one around. Our jigs came up empty and the side imaging and structure scan turned up nothing either.

A destroyer when we were trolling at Cape Henry. That lasted all of 30 minutes before we realized our stupidity and futility.

We later ventured to Cape Henry in a relatively fogless afternoon. Then all of a sudden the fog returned like a wall of snow. The seas picked up to giant rollers broken up with 2 foot chop. To make matters worse we were in line to Rudee and a few charters blew past us. But we might have seen 4 fishing boats all day. One of them appeared to be hooked up to a tuna less than a mile from Cape Henry in a 20 foot center console. We circled the boat a few times waiting to see some glimpse of fin but it was taking too long. I don’t even want to fight one of those things for more than an hour, say nothing about watching someone else fight one. No thanks. We did mark a ton of fish and bait hugging the bottom near Cape Henry. I could have sworn we would have tripled up on fish but it never happened. Maybe they were all dog fish, or maybe they were the huge school of striped bass that seems to have vanished from that area lately. We talked to a few charter guys and checked every internet fishing board we could and everything said the striped bass bite died quicker than a deer on 95 in the rut. Charters were coming in early, refunding customers’ trips, many taking a complete skunk since last Thursday or Friday. The fish just seemed to have vanished all at once.

Well, maybe the ocean size “Schoolies”, the 20 plus pounders have vanished but the bay size schoolies running from 3 to 10 pounds are there for the catching if you want to play. Find some deeper water pilings near the islands and drop your favorite jig. It won’t take long to get some pullage. I think it’s time for some power plant fishing closer to home. But the warm winter isn’t attracting the fish as well as the cooler weather this time of year usually does. Maybe it’s time for some muskie fishing which I hear is about as hot as it can be from the DC to Nashville. Just about any named river from Tennessee to NY is producing trophy muskie right now. I guess my legendary gannet storm will have to wait till March. See you then Mr. Striped bass. Or like my son likes to call them, see you later Striper diaper.