[Skolmann]

My son and a mutual friend of ours got into a nice bass bite Friday evening on live bait. I returned with them on Saturday and although the bass didn’t want to cooperate (our friend did eventually catch a 20”er) we did get into a nice bluefish bite with fish in the #3-6 class. At first we were having our live bait attacked/bitten in half (although we did manage to catch a few on the bait we were using).Then we noticed some surface blow ups and we switched to throwing topwater poppers and it was game on for the next 60+ minutes. Every cast resulted in multiple blow ups (some as soon as the plug hit the water). It was pretty much a fish per cast. We returned again last evening and the blues seemed to have moved out. Our friend once again caught a mid 20 inch bass before I left. Jason and he stayed later and upon speaking with Jason later on he said they each caught several bass to 32”s.

Side note
On Saturday, something happened to me that had never happened to me before in my 50+ years of fishing. As I attempting to remove the belly treble hook of a #4 blue that oddly/strangely enough was only hooked by the belly treble-to that point almost every bluefish I ever caught in my life on a plug had the tail hook in it’s mouth and the belly hook either snagged in the side of the head/body somewhere or was free. The fish made a flop causing the tail single hook to impale itself into the palm of my left hand. Although it wasn’t deep, it went in past the barb. Our first move was to use a split ring plier to remove the belly treble (with the blue still hooked to it) from the plug. Once we did that, Jason attempted to use the fishing line trick to pop the hook. He has preformed this maneuver countless times as a mate on party/charter boats with success. Unfortunately due to the angle he was unsuccessful. After a few minutes of thought, it was decided that since it didn’t appear to be too deep to push the point of the hook through my skin, crush the barb and back the hook out. Fortunately that was successful. I cleaned the wound on site and when I got home. No longer seemed concerned about an infection as there is no redness, warmth, pain (although there is some degree of soreness)or oozing from the either puncture. Tetanus is up to date.