I guess the part about "last post in awhile" was a lie. I honestly expected to struggle for awhile before connecting with any decent fish here, but my first two days of fishing in Massachusetts were pretty successful. Day 1 I got off the plane at 6am and was too tired to get any work done but the 20oz Dunkies I slammed before getting in the rental car ruled out sleep as an option. Decided to buy a trusty walmart ugly stik and some squid and tried a random spot off the rocks. Started immediately catching scup. Really fun fish; they fight a lot harder than spotties and are incredibly aggravating to hook. I got bites literally every cast for hours and only managed five, but they were all legal size or close to it so maybe it was just the little guys that were cleaning me out. Came back a couple days later with smaller hooks and didn't have an easier time hooking them. Also caught a bunch of black sea bass; all but one were tiny. What a cool looking fish.

I also had some fun catching snapper blues off the rocks. The guy at the tackle shop told me to use a popping cork with a little piece of surgical tube at the end. Felt pretty stupid when I first started fishing it but once I found some schools blowing up on microbait I started catching them. Too small to put much of a bend in the rod but still pretty fun to watch them boil on the trailer behind the popping cork, and I heard that at this size they're much better eating than adult bluefish but I didn't bring any ice or a bucket with me and I still had the rental car. It was also cool to see how aggressively they were feeding on bait; I can only imagine how exciting it is to see adults doing that.

The highlight of the first day (and of the week) was when I tried casting a swimbait in this harbor that I found. I didn't get any bites but there was tons of bait and a striper followed my swimbait to the rocks. I went back in the evening and followed the school of peanut bunker as it moved its way down the rocks with the tide until I hooked into a striper. Soon after, a pack rolled through and started exploding on the bait, sometimes jumping out of the water or pushing it all the way to the shoreline. Caught a few more and missed some other bites. Super exciting to watch packs of four or five fish all hit a bait school at the same time and have them crush swimbaits being burned in along the surface. Pretty crazy that a similar spot in sd would only have tiny spotties, sometimes corvina/short barracuda, and the occasional halibut. I tried again last night and didn't get any but got followed again, so they're still around. Gotta figure out what was different about the first day; right now what stands out to me is that it was slack tide right at sunset and there was a huge rainstorm later that night.

https://ibb.co/album/84ffNp

Yikes, nothing more frustrating than having to drop someone off at the dock early when you haven't scored yet. Seasickness is no joke but if you're prone to it there's plenty of things you can buy to prevent it.

Quote from: jrodda on August 22, 2023, 03:16:02 PM
Cool summary of the season, thanks for posting.

Keeping threshers/sharks does seem prickly at times, but I think as long as you have some reasons/personal code to follow besides "kill everything" then I think you're golden. Release is always a good option.

That trip ruined by a hip sounds horrible. Though the bilge failing sounds even worse...

Good luck in New England. I spent a year there and only flicked a fly for stripers a hand full of times. Nearly had a heart attack watching a striper chase my streamer and almost engulf it, then missed the hook set. The striper thing is sick up there, along with the bottom fish, and the giant bluefin...a very well fleshed out fishery. I LOVE the people up in Boston. Wicked smart. If the weather weren't dogsh!t for 6 months I might have stayed.

Yeah, those events sucked but it made the redemption all the better. You definitely have to pay your dues sometimes (something I anticipate I will be doing a lot when I move to an area where I have no knowledge of the fishery and don't know anyone). Hopefully I can find something to keep me occupied during the cold winter months.

Quote from: Latimeria on August 21, 2023, 07:05:35 PM
Hey Kam, what a great read!  I don't know where to start except that it was great having you on here and hopefully you pop back in now and again to share some NE style fishing!  I've fished NE a lot, but it was almost exclusively in the summertime.  LOL

It was great following your experiences.  I've always wanted to help on how to catch them, but the spot sharing could just ruin areas so quickly since everyone wants immediate gratification these days.  The people who put the work in for the hunt part will always have much more of my appreciation than the guys who spot burn.

As for the divers, well it's just a lot of fishermen in general.  It's the classic bell curve out there 25% assholes - 50% that can go either way and 25% that follow their own path.

Super glad you came onto the site and I hope to see a report from you sometime in the future.  Still a lot of good fishing to be had there until the first snows come down!

Happy Trails boss!

Chow-Da on a cold day and Wheh did you Pack the Ca? lol, sorry I couldn't help it. 

Thanks Tom! It was always a pleasure to read your posts and be a member of your forum. Hopefully I'll have some big striped bass pictures to share in the near future.

Hey everyone, it's been a long time since I posted. I'll be moving to New England in less than a week and I wanted to get in as much West Coast fishing as I could before leaving. I'm very excited to fish up there; it seems like things are a lot more inshore oriented there and it's easier to catch a nice fish without a serious boat, but the no-fish-of-any-species in the wintertime and the Cape Cod canal mayhem (I've already seen multiple videos of fistfights) will take some getting used to. But hey, nobody there will try to argue that an open faced conventional setup with no reel seat is the ideal choice for throwing lures!

First, the reason why I initially joined this forum - surf sharks. I'll admit that I've done very little surf sharking since 2020, but I got back into it last May-June for a few weeks before persistent bad surf conditions put an end to it. Caught a bunch of leopards, and got a nice soupie on the one night where my phone died. The only evidence I had was a video of my scraped up rub leader. Oh well. Still was nice to pull on one for the first time in awhile, I forgot how hard they fight compared to leopards.

Those few weeks of surf sharking also brought the internal conflicts of spot sharing into the forefront. A bunch of my friends also got into surf sharking at the time, and then told their friends, and it soon became a thing where multiple people were at the spot every night for multiple days in a row. They had already known about that spot, and some of them had already fished it earlier that year, but it was a spot that they had all initially found out about through me (I had been fishing it since before most of them moved to San Diego). At one point, I saw a video of my friend with maybe ten other people he had invited. Most of them weren't fishermen and were only there to spectate, but it still got under my skin. As much as sharks are lightly targeted compared to many other species (one can only imagine the chaos if Yellowtail could be reliably caught from shore), it does seem like biting shark spots stop being productive very quickly in response to pressure when compared to a lot of other fish. Shark fishing's also pretty controversial compared to other types of fishing, and relentless shark fishing in a particular area can make everyone look bad if done irresponsibly. I also think that learning about sharking through people on this forum instilled in me a mindset of being tight-lipped about spots and irritated when others aren't. I'll admit that in years past when I was really into shark fishing, it used to drive me insane when I'd go weeks or even months without a shark and I'd see Steve and Tom post multiple giant sevengills every Tuesday. It's still more rewarding to find them yourself, though. As it is frustrating when you put in the time and effort and others get to take shortcuts, especially if they bag a particular fish that you've been working for for awhile on their first try (has happened a lot over the years). There's definitely a fine line between protecting your spots and the fishery and coming across as a selfish asshole who won't share with anyone and wants all of the fish to himself, and I admit when it came to this past spring's bite I was falling more in the latter category.

I also went out in my friend's boat a few weeks ago for a thresher expedition. It had also been a few years since I had targeted them, but since I had seen a couple on research trips earlier in the week and his brand new boat still didn't have a bait tank, it seemed like the best option for hooking something exciting from his rig. We ended up releasing a nice one that put up a great fight on 40lb. The best part was the bite; it grabbed the mackerel 20ft from the boat as I was sending the balloon out and there's nothing like winding tight to one and watching it greyhound across the surface. Looking back, I probably should have kept it, but we didn't have any ice or cooler and at least we gave it a better chance of surviving than it would have had if it had gotten the gaff. Either way, it was my first one in 3 years and it'll probably be a long time until I fish for them again. Definitely a species I almost feel bad for targeting since it sometimes feel like you can't win. You keep one, people get mad. You release one, people get mad. You share where you caught it, you're a spot burner. You don't share, you're a selfish asshole who wants all the fish to himself blah blah blah

I also did a lot of Yellowtail fishing at the Islands and Rockpile from my friend's skiff and a couple of charters. Definitely a great period of fishing. Our first trip there in my friend's boat was a disaster. This other guy who he invited on neglected to inform us that he had a broken hip. The ride out and the first few hours were really windy and bumpy, and right as the sun came out and the ocean became flat calm he told us that the pain was too much and we needed to go back. Left biting fish without putting the right kind in the boat, and when another friend who had gone out on a different boat sent pictures of the Yellowtail he had caught in the afternoon I almost threw my phone across the room. I understand that an injury like that is no joke and we did not hesitate to reel up our lines and take him back, but it's really poor form to make everyone else on the boat cut their day short for anything short of an emergency. Most of us don't get to fish as often as we'd like to, and when you factor in the limited number of days with good conditions and the right kind biting, things like preexisting medical conditions, predispositions to seasickness, and obligations later in the day need to be made upfront about before getting on the boat, not at the grounds when the fish start biting. The kicker is that we didn't hear one single "I'm sorry" or even a "thank you for taking me back" from him. Ironically, he ended up saving our asses since we realized as we were passing the lighthouse on the way back in that the bilge had stopped working and we had taken about 100 gallons of water.

Fortunately, we got redemption the following weeks. I was crossing my fingers and checking the water temp charts multiple times a day, worried that the water would flip before our next shot. Fortunately, the conditions just got better and better. They were biting really well on Rapalas and flyline/slow trolled sardines on 20 and 30lb. Really great grade too, quite a few in the 20-30lb range. Had one really good opportunity to catch one on an iron; I missed a bump and then this other boat pulls up and divers get in the water, scaring off the school. Good thing we caught plenty of fish that day because it would have completely ruined the trip if that was our one shot. In my frustration, I cast maybe a little too close at the nearest diver which I immediately felt bad and hypocritical about, as I've always thought that someone getting too close or ruining an opportunity to catch a fish is never an excuse to potentially injure someone with a chunk of iron. Regardless, some of these divers need to learn when to stay out of the water as they were a hazard on multiple other occasions during that stretch of warm, clear water and abundant Yellowtail. They all love to say "zero bycatch," well if you keep jumping in the water where we're casting jigs or dragging rapalas you might end up being the bycatch.

Long post, but I learned a lot from this forum and it was great to fish with those on this forum that I fished with. I would ideally like to return to Southern California one day; there's a lot of reasons why living here can suck but it's still a great part of the country that I loved living in the past several years. Hopefully if I figure out how to catch fish in New England I'll share some of those posts too!

Here's a link to some of the photos:

https://ibb.co/album/QvQq6t

Quote from: SevengillTheVC on August 04, 2021, 10:15:42 AM
That is one ugly beast of a Yellow! Really cool that your patience and perseverance payed off with a top grade fish!

It's cool how much more character they get as they grow bigger; kelp paddy clones are all perfect copies of some tropical looking species while the adults really start to get that amberjack appearance and attitude. I heard from a buddy that worked on a yellow stomach content analysis project that as they get bigger, their diet starts to get more varied. He said that he found nearly every small fish species imaginable, plus some unexpected forage items like lobsters and sea urchins.

Quote from: Latimeria on August 04, 2021, 05:27:18 AM
Nicely done boss!  I was out on Saturday and found plenty of squid, but the water temps were only 61.5-62.5 which was 9 degrees colder than two days prior.

Man, having that fish at the end of the day probably made the rest of your day a dream.  The last minute heroics are my favorite fish to catch at least. Biggun!

As previously said, nice write up!

Crazy how it just kept dropping and dropping out there; last I heard it was down all the way to 56 degrees. It was definitely one of the better days of work I've had afterwards haha

Thanks! Thought I tried that but something must've not been working right

I haven't posted on here in awhile but I figured I might as well. I spent last week dead set on getting a homeguard Yellow. The warm water and 15lbers that others and I were getting a few weeks ago got replaced by cold water and straight big ones. I went out Monday and through sheer random luck found a squid bed. I had no idea they were around and loaded up the tank, excited at the possibilities. Unfortunately, I found out that bass absolutely love live squid (not sure what I was expecting, to be honest). Everywhere I tried fishing the squirts, from top to bottom, in any spot I tried, the bass were immediately on it. I got nailed by a couple sand bass on my first few drops at the squid beds, so I moved away from that area only to find bigger and more persistent swarms of bass. It was pretty frustrating, especially considering most of the bass that bit were too small to even eat the squid all the way and I kept getting cleaned out.

The next few days were tough to watch. Tied up by work, I saw numerous large Yellows get posted on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Of course, this means that way more were caught that never found their way on the internet. Most were caught on squid. Most were caught right on the beds I had too quickly moved from on Monday. Word got out that both candy and big fish were around; when my buddy showed me a newspaper article published Wednesday talking about the hot bite, I knew I needed to get out before the weekend. I had work on Friday, but not until the afternoon. With some reluctance, I set my alarm for 4am and loaded up the car. I knew I needed to be back early, but any shot is better than no shot.

4am came quickly, as it usually does. I dragged myself out of bed and launched while it was still dark out. Bait was everywhere; I quickly loaded up the tank with greenbacks, jack Macks, sardines, and finally some squid. That was about the only thing good about the conditions though; the water had dropped a few degrees more from Monday, now sitting at 66 degrees, and was green and scummy. Even more so, the squid beds were a parking lot of boats and kayaks. After chasing down a bird school in 200ft that quickly sunk down as I was overtaken at the last second by a boat driving right on top of them, I went back to the crowds and sent a few squid down. Nothing. Even the bass from earlier in the week were no longer in the mood, and all I saw get caught was a bat ray. It seemed like I had missed the bite.

After a few hours of this, it was almost time for me to head back and I already begun to accept my skunk. Since I still had lots of jack macks in my tank, I figured I'd at least troll one on the way back in. A buddy had been on the new Seaforth the day before and lost a big yellow in shallow while the boat was scratching away at bass. I was working my way back to the point in 30ft of water when my clicker started to go off in short, sputtering bursts. I initially thought a small bass was messing with the bait. I later realized that the mack was instead TERRIFIED and frantically trying to escape from something, as when I turned the clicker off and let the bait swim back a little further something grabbed it with force, nearly backlashing my reel. I put the reel in gear and the rod nearly got ripped out of my hand. Several intense minutes later, the right kind circled into view. I gaffed it and was elated. Although a few lbs short of my PB kayak yellow caught last April, the circumstances in which I hooked it and the often-rare feeling of a plan perfectly working together made it one of the most memorable so far. I was lucky to have gotten that opportunity when and how I did, as the general consensus from the guys that stayed on the beds that day was that the fish had been keyed in on squirts that week and that the bite had pretty much died. I had been reconsidering my commitment to the kayak yellowtail hunt over the previous couple of weeks, as it often feels like a ton of work for little reward, but all it takes is one fish to keep the fire going. I know I'll be back out soon.

https://kamwalsh.smugmug.com/My-First-Gallery/n-29SBvt/i-Q36GHtC/A

I've gotten back into it this last week after not targeting sharks all fall and early winter except for some bay leos (not as exciting but it's nice to be able to count on fishable conditions every time!) I've been trying some new spots up and down the coast for variety's sake; no luck yet but some promising signs. It is a little annoying to only be able to determine if a spot's biting or not by sitting there for hours in the same spot! That plus the distractions of all the other local species that have been biting!

Epic night! Some good ones to make it worth the trip out and a couple near misses to make it worth the trip back! 

I've been trying to stock up on bait for sharks and it's been tough. Macks have been very scarce; even tried for a couple hours at the bait barge and didn't get a single one. I've yet to find any grocery store or tackle shop bait that I've had any confidence in; seems like the stuff just gets ignored for me. Next summer/fall when the macks are thick I'm gonna stock up and try to vacuum seal some but for now do you guys have any good bait suggestions for this time of year? I'm even thinking about going surf perching so I can get something fresh thats worked for me before.

Quote from: Latimeria on February 14, 2020, 06:15:53 AM
Beautiful Butt!  I can only imagine your face when your are cranking the swimbait along the bottom and it instantly stops dead in it's tracks... Like the second you know it isn't a bass!  LOL

Bravo sir!

I thought it was a big sand bass at first but started to get a little suspicious when it didn't "give" after the first couple runs haha

Awesome thanks Ben!

I've been wanting to get Halibut dialed in for awhile; either from the surf or from my yak. Unfortunately with work and school my fishing windows are usually limited to the nighttime, not the best halibut fishing hours in most cases. Luckily one decided to work around my schedule last weekend and ate a 6.5'' fluke. Does 4am count as really late at night or really early in the morning?

As usual I could not get the photos to upload to this website even after resizing so I attached the link here if anyone wants to see it:

https://kamwalsh.smugmug.com/My-First-Gallery/n-dZKfwC/i-MPFLtZr/A

I also ordered a dozen sputs and I'm ready to do some sharking. I think the next time I go out in the yak this weekend I'm gonna drift a glowstick rig off the stern and see if I can make bait that way; I had a lot of trouble finding Macks from the piers at this time last year and hopefully this should be a better way. I don't want to resort to having to use bullet tuna again because although I know some of you guys have had success with it I personally have zero confidence in that stuff. It's gonna be hard to resist the urge to not send all the Macks back down for another halibut though.