T-Shirt Toggin

[CubasFinest12]

Tough to find any crabs this past week, but luckily scraped up just over a 5 gallon bucketfull of nice green crabs.
On saturday, my dad and his buddy fished all over the sandy hook reef, long branch and deal, shallow and deep with only short tog and seabass. With the Sheepshead bay boats reporting good catches, we gave it a shot out that way.

Soo on sunday, my father and I pushed off the dock in keyport at 6 am and headed northeast off long island to some rough bottom. Anchored up in 45ft dropped some crabs and waited. I know for blackfish sometimes you need to "build the bite" but there was no life at all, no bergals, no dinky seabass, NO TOG. Made another 10 drops, from mussel beds, to the pits of hell with nothing to show for it. Finally around 11 o'clock we hit it right. A slow pick turned into an all out suicide bite. All quality fish, and in an hour my father managed 13 keeper sized tog, 7 over 20 inches, and 1 which was a monster probably just at 10 pounds (pictured below). I struggled a bit, but kept the shorts off of his hook and managed 6 keepers to 19 inches. Around 1230 the boat traffic of a*******'s chasing bird life 10 feet from us knocked us off the piece and we couldn't land back on it correctly. Called it a day and took an hour ride back to keyport. Two of us managed just over 20 keeper sized tog (only keeping two fish at 16 and 19 inches) and probably just as many shorts. That one piece saved the day!

On monday morning, we got passed the sailboats in the back of keyport around 645, and headed right back to where we had them the prior day. Read some life and put our crabs right on top of them with NO BITES. The current was screaming and the fish had lockjaw. Again we bounced around piece to piece with not much to show for it. Made a drop out deep (65FT) and we found them! Big blackfish on the chew again, very aggressive. One after another for about 30 minutes then it dried up. Managed 7 keepers on this drop, not counting many fish that were right around 15/16 inches but didnt bother to measure. I finally brought size to the table and landed one that was 23inches. It was now around noon, and all conditions died, no current no wind. So we went back to our honey hole and picked and plucked a decent catch. My dad landed another monster, at 25 inches. As i was cutting the legs off the crabs i look down into the water and see something eating the bits.... TRIGGERFISH! Managed to land a couple MONSTER triggers for the table and called it a day before the afternoon SE wind started to blow.

Awesome weekend with my old man, as the water cools hopefully the bite will get better. It was awesome to see some big triggers still lurking. Fish seemed to still be on the softer mussel bottom and were very active. On day 2 they bit in flurries and seemed to be moving alot down there.

[tolvo]

Very nice post and Let's go Mets!

[Chris1129]

Looks like that one escaped a near death, speargun attack!