Fish Report 10/7/07
Good news below signature
Hi All,
Dogoned easterly winds keep pushing more warm water in. The water temp was 75 degrees outside the inlet and 73 degrees 20 miles out today.
That's great news if you like swimming and surfing. Hasn't been very helpful to the fishers!
It'll change. Maybe slowly over time or all-at-once-in-a-big-blow, but, sure as the leaves are going to fall, the water temps are going to drop.
I suppose what's going on is that we are 'stuck' in August. Traditionally, that's the hardest month for bottom fishing. Everything out there seems just like the difficult late summer period. Save the calendar of course.
Had a light rail during the week. Monday and Tuesday we had excellent flounder fishing with some bonus sea bass and croakers thrown in. The rest of the week was eh-OK for flounder, up and down for croaker and a few shots of sea bass. Though I think most scratched a dinner out of it, Sunday was tough. The sorta tough that makes "Boat for Sale" signs go up in marinas.
No, not mine.
Many years ago I read Winston Churchill's multi-volume history of WWII. When he spoke of 'darkest before the dawn' it was a whole lot darker than an off fishing season!
The water will cool -just a little- and the fishing will get better.
Maybe tomorrow.
Perhaps the silver lining might be that difficult times bring about management changes. We need to ensure that industrial overwinter trawl effort doesn't unduly impact stocks of fish from a particular area. We need to learn what might be done to actively improve spawning success of the fish under management. We still need to find out if there's really any coral out there. We don't even have any fisheries work indicating that sea bass survive when released. On and on...
There was a black sea bass tagging study awhile back from Massachusetts to at least Virginia. What, 60,000 tags? It was a lot! We had a day on the O.C. Princess -that big, beautiful Lydia at Shantytown- when we tagged 1,150 sea bass in a day. After the biologists threw down their clip boards in surrender; those aboard who wanted some for dinner still caught what they wanted!
That's more sea bass than I've seen in the last two weeks.
Where's the study? There's been plenty of time. All those thousands and thousands of tags and not a peep.
Publish or perish? Maybe sometimes it's- if you publish you perish.
Derned if I know. Hope nobody's sitting on it.
Need the data and then put it to work in management.
Lots of work to do out there.
The good kind soon as the water temp breaks.
Regards,
Monty
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