Fish Report 8/9/17
A Summer Pick
Mal de Mer
A Greening Sea
Summer 'We'll Fish For What's Biting Trips' .. Might be flounder, might be sea bass, might be
a mix. If you absolutely have to have one and not the other, don't reserve!
Sailing Daily - Weather Permitting - Saturday's 6:30 to 3:30 - $125.00 Otherwise 7 to 3 at $110.00.. 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..
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..
Bonine Is Cheap Insurance! Crystalized Ginger Works OK For Some. "Natural Dramamine" Does NOT!
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. Chewable Meclizine is a good pharmaceutical, chewable Bonine is a "less drowsy" meclizine pill; prescription Scopolamine Patches are
the gold standard.
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!
Please Support the Ocean City Reef Foundation!
We're Nowhere Near Reef Building's True Potential.
2017 Reef Raffle!! Benelli USA has donated another spectacular shotgun! A Benelli Super Black Eagle II, 25th Anniversary Limited Edition, 12ga 28" in Black Cerakote.. Tix are $10.00 - available aboard
and/or email if you want me to mail you some. If you want to sell some, could REALLY use the help...
If you know anyone with pallets of unsalable block, I know a fishy place or two we can store them.
Forever. Will pay for trucking.
If you have a few blocks in the backyard taking up space and just making snake reef, bring em. We'll toss
em overboard with the rest.
18,631 Reef Blocks deployed at numerous sites: TNC's Restoration Reef 278 - Doug Ake's Reef 3,300 - St. Ann's 1,742 - Al Giles/OC RUST Reef 1,426 - Eagle Scout Reef 954 - Sue's Block Drop 386 - Nichols' Concrete 1022 - Capt. Bob's Block Drop 691 - Benelli Reef 398 - Capt. Bob's Reef 664 - Wolf & Daughters Reef 210
Greetings All,
Summer fishing chugs along. Some days are truly wonderful with an exciting bite & many keepers. Other days, not so much.
Sea bass remain an important component of a day's catch while flounder/fluke increase. Somedays, however, it's ALL sea bass and no flounder. If you want flounder only - or sea bass only - Do Not Book.
Well practiced, Bob landed our first flounder limit of summer last week. Biting well, his limit was followed by several others that day. Still waiting for that action to repeat; we are seeing some flounder almost every day.
Recently we had a rainy day where the flounder bite was excruciatingly slow. As the sky cleared, the bite turned on and we barely saved the day.
So it was the weather, right?
Ehh, not so fast. My old friend Capt Ricky up in Lewis was amazed at how good the bite was ..at the exact time we were suffering!
This is summer fishing.. Please know my crew & I will do all we possibly can to send you home with fish. We truly don't want your day to end until after the dishes are washed. I may not know what's going to bite, but I'll try like heck to find something biting!
Especially important in summer when more folks are in "introduction to fishing" mode; a certain way to ruin a day is seasickness.
The self-inflicted "closed the bar" kind we cannot help. That lesson is a part of life. Most seasickness, however, is preventable.
Bonine seems best. Chewable, non-drowsy: It Works.
I had a physician give his young son 5 Dramamine on a 12 hr trip. That kid didn't weight 60 pounds. If it's rough - up your dosage! Our dear fishing friend and tackle shop owner now passed, Sue Foster, used to take two dramamine in the morning and another in a couple hours.
Another trick is to take a regular drowsy type before bed and then medicate again in the morning. That regime has been almost fool-proof.
What does NOT work is "Dramamine Naturals."
I have seen regular candied Ginger work a thousand times. Though ginger based; I have seen this new product from Dramamine fail at every use.
It's no good.
Time in an automobile, even an airplane, is no comparison. Prevention Works. Why risk what might be a once in a lifetime day for "I didn't think I'd get sick"...........
On page 36 of the Coastal Fisherman's August 9 edition I published a letter to marlin fishers.
Letter below; I have had no feed back whatever.
If the men who own those multi-million dollar boats decided to put white marlin back on the Jackspot again after 40 years, it could be done.
Wouldn't be cheap, but we could turn the ocean blue again. Promise.
The saddest part of fisheries management today is management's refusal to even THINK marine habitat has a role to play. They're going to 'restore' fish populations by catch restriction, and catch restriction alone. If they could only, finally, control catch.. First it was foreign trawlers, then it was US trawlers, then gill nets, then bass traps -- now MRIP has discovered the true culprit all along: NOAA Is So Proud To Demonstrate How Small Private Boats Routinely Outfish ALL Party/Charter & Commercial Trawl/Trap Professional Fishers.
Truth. That's what's in the recreational catch data.
That's WHY every fishery we have is shrinking to near-death from regulation.
Private Boats are overfishing worse than foreign trawlers. That's what NOAA demands regulators believe.
Success stymied -- there has to be overfishing SOMEWHERE! We DON'T HAVE TIME FOR HABITAT!! There's OVERFISHING to find!!!
It remains true there were more sea bass caught by trawl from 1950 to 1961 than in all the years since, all
combined.
I am 100% certain that 1950 population of sea bass could not possibly be recreated today.
We no longer have the habitat those fish lived on.
I am also 100% certain that 1950 population of cbass could be recreated if habitat restoration were undertaken.
First NOAA & NMFS will have to discover seafloor's emergent growths are important to our reef fish.
I'm serious. We haven't advanced to even that stage. Too tangled up chasing their tail with despicable made-up MRIP recreational catch estimates.
On realization habitat is important to rebuilding fish populations, (and not just catch restriction,) then they'll need to discover what reef-like bottoms are left.
But finding out not what's left, but what habitat's been lost - and then restoring it - that's the key to real & sustained fisheries restorations.
A similar case could be made for billfish. Who could guess what parts of our marine ecosystem have unraveled owing this pea-green soupy mess out front today. Our ocean water this year is THE WORST I've ever seen.
We could never-ever restore marlin to their traditional grounds with present day water quality.
Where sight feeders like billfish require clear water, (blue water being the clearest,) failing to restore biofiltration by oysters in our major estuaries has left a green, over-algeaed mess.
It's all doable.
Really.
Repair is absolutely possible.
Have to pry their eyes away from those dagoned computer screens & catch estimates. Repair habitat & fish will flourish.
Amazingly.
Keep chasing stupid assertions of catch that could not possibly be true; NOAA will have destroyed most of our recreational fisheries in over-regulation
..without true biological restoration of even a single one.
Regards,
Monty
Capt. Monty Hawkins
Partyboat Morning Star
Ocean City, MD
Page 36 of August 9, 2017 Coastal Fisherman...
Marlin Fishers,
We cannot catch white marlin today at the Jackspot where, two generations ago, men fishing that shoal considered it an "offshore trip."
Three generations ago white marlin were even caught at the Bass Grounds, Fenwick Shoal, & Great Gull Shoal. Seriously.. Baits were run astern scarcely 5 miles out with confidence.
The reason we can no longer target marlin inshore is green water. Water quality, though deteriorating even in the 1960s, crashed in the early 1980s with the collapse of oysters in Delaware & Chesapeake Bays. It continues to worsen.
Today we know how to restore oysters. There are no more excuses. Big substrates - rock, not shell - have shown remarkable oyster growth in recent years, especially at the Harris Creek project.
We absolutely, positively, know how to turn the Mid-Atlantic's now-green ocean waters blue again.
We have only to fund oyster reef building.
Support the CCA's Building Conservation Trust. https://www.buildingconservation.org <https://www.buildingconservation.org/> Earmark donations for Mid-Atlantic Oyster Restoration. Write all your representatives. NOAA may not have any idea the greening of our sea, but we do.
Support the Ocean City Reef Foundation too. While we do not build oyster reefs, we are growing a lot of coral off Maryland's coast.
With a rejuvenated food web in restored blue-again ocean waters; the 2022 WMO winner might be caught at Jackspot..
Regards,
Capt. Monty Hawkins
Ocean City Reef Foundation
http://www.ocreefs.org <http://www.ocreefs.org/>
