Fish Report 5/14/13
Reef Building
Sea Bassing Soon
Just A Day; A Gift
Reef Dinner Wednesday 5/15 - 5 to 7 at Hall's 59th Street.
LOTS & LOTS OF GREAT AUCTION/RAFFLE ITEMS -- BEST EVER!
More Rods Than Ever Before – There's Even An Autographed Photo Of Joe DiMaggio, An Autographed Card from Cal Ripken's 2000th Game; So Much! An unbelievable outpouring of support..
The Hall family is hosting and, as always, donating in its entirety our OC Reef Foundation fund raiser on Wednesday, May 15th from 5 to 7 at Hall's Restaurant, 59th street bayside in OC, MD.
All you can eat Italian; This year we'll also have ham & beef carving stations served up by Anthony's Carryout. Look for great silent, Chinese & live auction items and a good time with many reef supporters.
4,632 "oyster castle" reef blocks by the rail - 1,396 at Jimmy's Reef.
Need To Fund A New Truck Load Of Reef Blocks. Help! They're coming Monday..
Greetings All,
Tested with every anchor set & offered a less than robust tog bite, we finished the tog season with some of our best releases.
Tog along our coast are clearly getting ready to spawn. Females bursting with eggs; they're putting on the feed-bag to nourish coming generations.
On Monday's reef building trip, for instance, we caught 3 undersize male tog and 1 solid keeper ..but, being a fine example of exactly the sort of tog we'd like to see (though smaller,) I had Mike tag & release the handsome fellow to rejoin the upcoming spawning season..
All the rest of our tog that day were female — every one. Lots & lots of legal females up to 12 pounds were let go.
Bob, Alex, Greg, John – didn't blink. Put 'em back.
Did kill 4. Could have taken 36.
Tagged 'em instead.
Morning Star crew & six volunteers began Monday by loading 144 "oyster castle" reef blocks, 10 concrete planks & a double-anchor mooring buoy set-up.
Left anchors and poly balls positioned about 4 miles out at Ake's Reef. Several hours later Tow Boat US Ocean City made their bargeload of concrete pipe fast to the mooring: A perfect set right next to this boat.
Ake's Reef is growing swiftly: More Coral, More Fish.
Getting underway again, we carried our load of blocks & planks to where OC Diver patrons http://www.ocdiver.com have been constructing their lobster abodes on Taylor's Barge at the Queen Reef. We do have a report that the blocks from last summer are growing in nicely with mussels and are now minus one lobster..
Here's a video of what the blocks looked like last summer: http://vimeo.com/49834503 (and a good look at what I think our natural sea whip meadows looked like before post-WWII industrial fishing began..)
We didn't really build reef Monday, just delivered the material.
Be interesting to see what Ted Green & Co engineer.
Begin sea bassing Sunday.
If the weather's good.
Even though the bottom temp's chilly I've seen some fine sea bass well in sight of OC. Tagged the better examples to see about habitat fidelity..
Only thing missing is a season; An announcement.
I know many of the players. I'm positive they're not trying to deal us out of the sea bass fishery.
Still: Using bad recreational catch estimates they've tamped spawning production to a multi-decadal low via biological response to over-regulation; Then shortened our season to match their newly diminished production while blaming us for 'overfishing' — And Are Leaving Us Guessing When Our Shorter Season Will Begin
..all while we have nothing, absolutely nothing, in way of habitat management for our inshore or offshore sea bass habitat/corals.
At the top these folks have hundreds of fisheries to worry over, all with vocal participants..
Hey NOAA, can we get a sea bass season here please?
How about a bonus day too: Just A Day, A Gift — Open on Saturday instead of Sunday..
Coal more likely. I'll use it to build reef if they give me enough.
C'mon out to the Reef Dinner.
Building Habitat Is Making A Difference.
Regards,
Monty
Capt. Monty Hawkins
