Fish Report 12/22/16
More Cbassing
Small Scale Reef Building
An oldie: Spawning Habits of Outdoor Equipment
Sea Bass - Tuesday, Dec 27th - 6:30 to 3:30 - $125.00 (Reef Building the next day - see below)
Reservations Required at 410 520 2076 - LEAVE YOUR BEST POSSIBLE CONTACT NUMBER - Weather Cancelations Are Common - I Make Every Attempt To Let Clients Sleep In If The Weather's Not Going Our Way..
In winter waterproof boots are almost a necessity. (and great socks! like over the calf smartwool) While some rarely wear gloves for fishing, you'd not likely see me fishing this time of year w/o at least the half-finger wool gloves. https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B004EKIOWI/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1482168286&sr=8-5&keywords=wool+fingerless+thinsulate+gloves (Yes, OCRF is registered w/Amazon Smile)
Layers are best because, believe it or not, sometimes it can be very pleasant offshore--especially when the wind lays down. In winter it's warmer offshore owing to warmer waters. In summer it's cooler..
Be a half hour early! We always leave early! ..except when someone shows up right on time.
Clients arriving late will see the west end of an east bound boat. With a limited number of reserved spots, I do not refund because you over-slept or had a flat..
Dramamine Is Cheap Insurance! (Meclizine's Better! Clients like "Bonine" brand best..) Crystalized Ginger Works Great Too. It's Simple To Prevent Motion Sickness, Difficult To Cure. If You Suffer Mal-de-Mer In A Car You Should Experiment On Shorter Half-Day Trips First! (Wockenfuss Candies sells crystalized ginger locally - We usually have some aboard - Better is Nuts.Com.. Chewable Meclizine is a good pharmaceutical, there's also a "less drowsy" meclizine pill that a lot of clients like, especially Bonine; Scopolamine Patches are the gold standard. Stay away from 'ginger pills.'
Honestly - If you get to go on the ocean once month, once a year, or even less; why risk chumming all day? Similarly, if you howl at the moon all night, chances are good you'll howl into a bucket all day.
Bring A Cooler With Ice For Your Fish – A 48 Quart Is Fine For A Few People.
No Galley! BYO Sandwiches & Soft Drinks. A few beers in cans is fine. (bottles break at bad times)
If You Won't Measure & Count Your Fish, The State Will Provide A Man With A Gun To Do It For You. We Measure & Count — ALWAYS — No Exceptions!
14,929 Reef Blocks deployed at numerous sites: Doug Ake's Reef 2,881 - St. Ann's 1,555 - Al Giles/OC RUST Reef 1,089 - Eagle Scout Reef 904 - Sue's Block Drop 184 - Nichols' Concrete 738 - Capt. Bob's Block Drop 156 - Benelli Reef 341
Blocks Provided By Potomac Valley Brick - Thank You!
Support the Ocean City Reef Foundation! http://www.ocreefs.org (lots of reef pics here..) Also registered w/Amazon Smile. We're Nowhere Near Reef Building's True Potential. Thank You!
Reef Building - Wednesday, December 28th at 9AM to (probably 1ish..) Volunteers Wanted. Email mhawkins@morningstarfishing.com if you'd care to help. Boots & leather gloves; strong back/weak mind needed; we'll surely take the boat's total over 15,000 blocks on this trip..
Greetings All,
Couple more sea bass trips before we switch to winter tog. See above.
Lost my fishing trip Wednesday. Perfectly good weather for reef building. Did that instead.
Took near-about 10,000 pounds of concrete out to Doug Ake's Reef some 4.5 miles SE of Ocean City Inlet. I hope Ake's Reef to one day be enormous. It's gotten a fine start over the last few years. Have added close to 30,000 pounds from three recent trips with my boat over the last few weeks.
Now, a properly funded reef program might sneer at such small potatoes. But when trying to accomplish anything on the Chesapeake Bay State's Atlantic coast, it's best to just get going and do what you can. Probably best to never wait for government when you're as far off the radar as fishing is.
For the first time in decades, last year a Maryland bond bill contributed fully 25% of what we spent on our Iron Lady project. There is hope.
One day too NOAA might notice reef fish living around reefs and ponder whether more reef would be a good idea. Might!
Maybe the Navy will get real tired of preserving all those mothball fleets of WWII ships. Turn them into target practice..
Navy sank a bunch of ships off Vieques, Puerto Rico, but those dang things are so deep, 10,000 feet as I recall, can't imagine a benefit to marine life.
If they'd been spread out in 15 to 30 fathoms up & down the coast, those target-practice ships would have created a powerful economic benefit in the fishing & diving communities of many states.
If concrete precast companies got a recycle credit for reefing scrap units....
Whole lotta Can't.
Need some Can To.
Working on a piece that more clearly shows how habitat capacity, which many restorationists consider a hypothetical, is already a stop; is already holding up progress..
For now I'm reminded with all this Christmas shopping going on, and some of it in a sporting goods store, its difficult to tell whether your gear is breeding, or if Santa snuck something down the chimney..
More on that below with an excerpt from Fish Report 3/30/08.
Cheers All & A Merry Christmas!
Monty
Capt. Monty Hawkins
From Fish Report 3/30/08
........As I mentioned in a report a few years back, Pat McManus's column figured strongly in my misspent youth. Appearing monthly in "Outdoor Life," many thought he was a humorist. Odd: I thought he was a scientific philosopher of the highest caliber. I remember well one of his works; a study on the spawning habits of shotguns.
True. Anyone who has ever put more than two shotguns in a darkened gun cabinet will testify to their reproductive success (RS). Breeders have been trying to manipulate the yield and characteristics of plants and animals for thousands of years. However, the mysteries of sporting equipment's non-linear hereditary transmission remain unresolved.
McManus's work attempted to discover why, for instance, one pair of single shots in different gauges will conceive a 16 gauge side-by-side; while in another cabinet with a similar breeding pair the offspring may well be an automatic, say a Belgian Browning round-knob.
Such dissimilar offspring strongly contradict Mendel's early twentieth-century work on dominant/recessive gene characteristics.
Unfortunately, McManus's study was inconclusive.
Any outdoor equipment might have been used in the study. Duck and goose decoys are incredibly prolific spawners, shut away in a dark place for long months as they are. Archers have reported similar behavior with their bows; kayaks out behind the shed; it's entirely possible fishing equipment's the hardest to control ~ and yes, sporting optics such as might separate a sharpshin from coopers hawk cannot be left alone in a rucksack either.
This time of year it's hard to figure whether Santa or spawning was the cause of any new gear..
Next Up - Spawning Grounds of Ladies Shoes.
