Keyport Seahawk - Tog scouting

[Chrisper4694]

Headed out sunday and i just gotta say.... what the hell is up this year with the stripers and bluefish... does anyone have any real theories? I know people are catching them, but this is the first season i've seen with zero big bluefish for us personally! zero! and on top of that, for the past 3 years, at least, every time we'd go out of blackfish we would (either on the way out or the way in) get to play with surface busting stripers in the 25-35 inch range... this year, three trips and haven't seen crap. something must have changed idk.

Anyway the birds, bait, and fish were pretty sporadic from what we could tell on the way out and we didn't really see any concentration of action. We didn't really feel like trolling so we went out to fish for tog pretty much as a scouting mission for next weekend. I'd personally choose tog fishing over striper trolling every time so i definitely didn't mind!

We had some pretty good action with for a few hours and some quality size as well. we fished 40-50' depths with jigs and bait rigs with green crab. we quickly filled our 1 fish per man limit and played catch and release for a few hours. I had 10 fish to the boat with the new jigs i made and 5 of them were keeper size, including a real nice 18" and a 20.5" (both released). The bait rigs caught more fish but didn't seem to be getting the size for whatever reason. I also unfortunately snapped #50 line on the reef during a hook set and also popped off what felt like a real monster tog, but maybe that fish will be waiting for me next weekend

After a bit of fun tog action, i was banned from using anymore crabs until next weekend and john realized we were being swarmed by seabass under the boat. Boy scout John, always being prepared, had squid hidden in his secret hatch so we started hitting up some little nugget seabass. size wasn't great but we had a few decent keepers in the mix to take home!

[Gerry Zagorski]

We did the same, target was Blackfish but wasn't going to pass up working birds or bunker and cast for a few Stripers..... Never saw anything worth while to set up on but did see several boats trolling south of the Highlands bridge and don't think they were into much....

Seems like the better fishing has been south of there and first thing in the AM... We did however see some birds start to work at the SR just an hour before the sun set but nothing happening on the entire ride back home to Leonardo.

If this year is like others, we should be getting into some good fishing between the channels in a few weeks....

[Chrisper4694]

yeah exactly, i mean if we saw guys hammering them trolling maybe we would've done it for a little, but we didn't. last few years by this time we were running into surface action every single trip out...seeing less bunker and more smaller bait too this weekend