Fish/Reef Report 8/28/24
Two Boat Limits of Mahi (plus one of the worst days in a decade!)
And, Reef Report 8/27/24 - A Habitat Investigation & Artificial Reef Monitoring Trip. (Which I was going to post that night but after a string of extra long days & a big dinner? The chair won..)
I'm going to continue to run mahi or sea bass trips with a light rail so everyone can fish going away from the boat. (Depends on what's biting! Had boat limits of mahi last two days. If you only want sea bass? Wait. If you only want mahi? Pray!) Opening through September Ninth. Fare is $225 and sells out at 12. (and maybe one more but I'd never advertise THAT number..)
Anna is a one person operation. She might be slammed when I hit send. (or maybe not!) If she cannot pick up, Leave her a message. She has a method to her madness..
Reservations at 443-235-5577 - She has other jobs too. The line closes at 8pm and reopens at 8am. She won't take reservations for trips that are not announced.
If you want a spot call the reservation line at 443-235-5577.. Emailing me is no good - her service handles reservations. I'll have no idea what spots have been sold. I do check email for questions; check FaceBook messenger too..
***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. Seriously, with a limited number of reserved spots, I do not refund because you overslept or had a flat.. If you're reserved and are the last person we're waiting on - you'll need to answer your phone. I will not make on-time clients wait past scheduled departure because of a misfortune on your part.
Sea Bass Size limit 13 inches - 15 per person.
Mahi are limited to 10 per-person and have no size limit save what your conscience allows.
Try to always leave a half hour early (and never an hour early!) I rarely get in on time either. If you have a worrier at home, please advise them I often come home late. It's what I do.
Trips Also Sometimes Announced on Facebook at Morning Star Fishing
https://www.facebook.com/ocfishing/
I post after action reports (or lack thereof) (and sometimes detailed thoughts on fisheries issues) for every trip on my personal FB page and Morning Star page. Posts including OC Reef Foundation work will be included on that page as well.
Bait is provided on all trips.
No Galley. Bring Your Own Food & Beverage.
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!
It's Simple To Prevent Motion Sickness, Difficult To Cure. Bonine seems our best over the counter because it's (supposed to be!) non-drowsy. It's truly cheap & effective insurance. If it makes you a bit sleepy - but not chumming? That's a great trade!
"The Patch" of Scopolamine, however, is a prescription only that beats all comers.
If the ocean still wants to get the better of you? Zofran (anti nausea) can be a day saver if you have it left over from a prescription.
Honestly - If you get to go on the ocean once a month, once a year or even less; why risk chumming all day? And then there's the ebullience of youth! Of course you can party hard and go on a moderately rough ocean!
No you can't!
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 Cooler Is Fine For A Few People. Do Not Bring A Very Large Cooler. We have a few loaners - you'll still need ice. Should you catch some monstrous fish, we'll be able to ice it.
No Galley! Bring Food & Beverages To Suit. A few beers in cans is fine for the ride home.
Block Update - As of 8/28/24 we have 42,122 Reef Blocks & 2,338 Reef Pyramids (170lb ea) deployed at numerous ACE permitted ocean reef sites. There are also 1,336 pyramids deployed by MD CCA at Chesapeake Bay oyster sites working to restore blue ocean water. Counting those awaiting deployment we have exceeded 5,000 pyramids made since my crew and I fashioned a prototype mold in late August 2019.
Currently being targeted oceanside: Ryan & Shari's Bay Breeze Reef 208 Pyramids - Uncle Murphy's Reef 284 Reef Blocks; Rambler Reef 400 Reef Blocks & 13 Pyramids - Pete Maugan's Memorial Reef 116 Blocks & 14 Pyramids - Calder's Reef Improvement 88 Blocks & 12 Reef Pyramids - Virginia Lee Hawkins Memorial Reef 550 Reef Blocks (+98 Reef Pyramids) - Capt. Jack Kaeufer's/Lucas Alexander's Reefs 2144 Blocks (+57 Reef Pyramids) - Doug Ake's Reef 4,194 blocks (+16 Reef Pyramids) - St. Ann's 3,035 (+14 Reef Pyramids) Unnamed Spot at Jackspot Reef 176 Blocks & 12 Pyramids (many w/bamboo added) - Sue's Block Drop 1,762 (+30 Reef Pyramids) - Kathy's Cable 276 blocks (11 pyramids) - Rudys/Big Dad's Barges 140 Reef Blocks (+9 Pyramids) - Benelli Reef 1,552 (+18 Pyramids) - Capt. Bob's Bass Grounds Reef 4,670 (+ 116 reef pyramids) - Al Berger's Reef 1,946 Reef Blocks (48 Reef Pyramids) - Great Eastern South Block Drop 260 Reef Blocks (+10 Pyramids) - Cristina's Blast 140 Reef Blocks & 2 Pyramids - Capt Greg Hall's Memorial Reef 362 Blocks (+2 Pyramids) - Kinsley's Reef 964 Pyramids - Bear Concrete Reef 512 Pyramids, 44 Blocks plus 16 pipes..
****
Shirts & Sweats at OCReefs.org for donors..
Now available as 'name a (small) reef' are 'Tog Cabins' made of parking lot car stops & 'Coral Castles' made of concrete pipe.
See ocreefs.org's 'donate' page for this opportunity.
Greetings All,
Fishing a super light rail for mahi has been mostly fun. Had one recent day (Monday!) that was a real clunker. Otherwise, when mahi bit? Fine. If not? Sea bass would save the day.
On the 27th and 28th, however, we landed boat limits of mahi. Nothing especially large but keepers for sure. George was first with a limit at 10:33 today - a full boat limit at 11:45...
See below for my explorations on the 27th made possible by Video Ray ROVs in Pottstown PA..
Reef Report 8/27/24 - A Habitat Investigation & Artificial Reef Monitoring Trip. (See Facebook for pics and coming videos. It's wide open public.)
An undecended fog hung darkly above Ocean City and surrounding waters as we departed 6:30 Tuesday morning, August 27, 2024. Inlet calm, seas calm; visibility soon dropped to a hundred yards or so. It wandered between 25 yards and a quarter mile all day; was crazy tight coming back in - an instrument approach all the way theough the inlet to Shantytown Channel.
No ordinary fishing trip; I had two engineers and $350,000+ worth of ROV (u/w Remote Operated Vehicle) equipment from Video Ray, a Pottstown PA company (videoray.com) that does u/w inspection & recovery/locating work for first responders & all our allies around the world.
Jason & Liam were here to not only test new equipment, but to look at some of our natural and artificial reefs while doing so.. "Know a boat we can use?"
Matter of fact, I did..
My first stop was on natural reef in 115 feet of water. I've been trying to determine if our greening sea has stymied sea whip colonization off DelMarVa. Though still quite productive, reef we saw there was not as healthy as shallower reefs. We found sea whip (a soft coral) there if growing more sparsely than anticipated. The area has produced millions of sea bass across the decades for com trap & rec fishers.
I don't know of any US work on sea whip, but in Australia they have it as a zooxanthellae driven gorgonian (an orange soft coral that uses sunlight to feed in the way many shallow water corals do. A healthy colony will look like an orange meadow - I call em whip meadows. Fluke and sea bass love it as habitat.)
We have sea whip in great number from 55 to 90 feet. They get thinner as you go deeper. (Haven't checked shallower lately) Is Sunlight really needed?
Consider.. Where, say, the hull of a barge is collapsed yet the deck is standing on it's uprights, it will leave a large empty void. You will find sea whip where light strikes the deck substrate.
But underneath?
Where there's no sun?
Here many sessile animals (cannot move or swim - mussels, corals etc) ..many animals will colonize these shaded places; no whip or star coral will be found.
Similarly - if too deep? No whip.
If sunlight is key, and it is; then I believe the oyster collapse of the 1970s lead to the Mid-Atlantic Ocean's eutrophication. That's just fancy science talk for too many nutrients in the water that feed rapidly growing algae populations. That algae is what makes the ocean and estuaries green.
Eutrophication has, I believe, caused our offshore sea whip habitat footprint to shrink--to contract. They are not as far off as they once were. It's going to take some digging, but I'm 90% sure I have VHS tape from 2004 of whip growing on the deepest reef we looked at with VisionRay's ultra advanced ROV equipment. I also have some old time commercial friends still in this world..
2004 - sea whip growth. This time? Same exact reef now in 2024? Not One Sea Whip..
And I do mean none.
More work is required - there are many more reefs to compare; but that's what I've been thinking - it's shrinking. . .
I sure hope the fellows from Video Ray will help with further explorations. If I put Nick Caloyianis & Co down there they'd only have a few minutes - and one dive. When divers are looking at inshore reefs in much shallower water we so multiple dives with a good amount of bottom time.
Though a bottom trawl will dern sure give a reef a haircut, I don't think what we saw on the deepest reef was trawl damage - - I think the absense of whip in 130ft is an artifact of a greening ocean.
Like I wrote - will need more investigation..
The only bad drop was on Benny LaSalle's Memorial Reef.
We had No Vis!! Deepest part of the Bass Grounds - had 7.5 fathoms (45ft) of visibility up top--not quite Caribbean but excellent for DelMarVa, yet Mississippi mud vis near bottom.
Darn.. Another day to explore Benny's.
We also looked at 4 other reefs.
Did I mention we found a floating basket? Two engineers and my crew limited on mahi in very short order. I was using a sea bass jig. Mahi would NOT let me get below the peanut mahi up top.
Nice..
In truth, as I've told many marine ecologists, "If bottom could be destroyed, it was." Some areas completely, some at least partly - and all post WWII into the late 1970s when commercial trawl really sprang to life with cheap surplus diesels.
Corals on our Bass Grounds reef grew on a soft marsh-like peat; a substrate easily crumbled in the hand ..and very easily crushed with 15 ton clam dredges that liquify the bottom. Both commercial trap and recreational party/charter fished w/o issue almost five decades.
Then the Bass Grounds were destroyed by surfclam boats in the early/mid-1970s.
I had no idea what he was talkin about back in 1981 when Capt. Ward Brex said to me: "We had the best sea bass fishing on the coast and let them destroy it."
He was a hardened professional mariner - took a route to Brazil, as I recall, during the winter; was owner of the Mast restaurant and Taurus 1/2 day partyboat. He was crying about the loss of habitat...
Today's surf clam/quahog boats dredge on the tops of shoals. Doesn't seem good for sand eels (crucial forage) but sure doesn't harm what remains of our hard bottom coral substrates.
While we've had virtually no trawling on hardbottom reefs here now in nearly fifteen years, (MD summer flounder quota is largely leased to large companies in upper NJ) ..commercial impacts from stern towed gear on soft substrates have been nonexistant.
Where softer substrates were lost some 50/60 years ago? Unless restored whatever value to fisheries productions our region once had will remain absent.
I did video impacts I observed, but those barren rock bottoms grew back during this recent period. Where substrate is either rock or sandstone? Regrowth is possible - not assured - yet likely given no further impacts occur.
I know of some rocky areas apparently not in good position to catch coral spawn that have not had growth since I first videoed them.
I believe it was 2001/02 when commercial fluke limits were raised considerably.
After a decade of catching a tiny daily quota very close to home; the first place MD's trawlers went was the whalebone slough in almost twenty fathoms. It happens this was an area of amazing growth - but not sea whip. Here bottom used by tens of thousands of sea bass (yes, really - I used to fish there once a week with 60/70 anglers with no bag limit) ..the "reef" on that bottom was numerous tube worm colonies. The growth was so dense and so soft your sinker would feel like it hit a pillow. I had half a dozen more spots like it into just 10 fathoms.
Today I have none.
Trawlers call tube worm colonies 'spaghetti mud.' They can and do lose nets to a dense patch of tube worm. Here divers can recover their gear - that's not always possible from a wreck.
Late in the period of virtually no trawling outside 4 or 5 miles (1990s/2000) when OC Trawlers could catch their measly 100 lb limit in an hour inshore, bottoms from 10 to 25 fathoms rested and recovered for almost a decade.
I wrote about it a lot back then.
For all the language in Manuson Stevens about Essential Fish Habitat, I did not get NOAA's attention, but I did try.
Begining in 2001 - "Hey Congress! Hey NOAA Habitat People! Coral Reefs Here! Take A Look!"
Naw..
I just did get a letter from a fellow at NOAA's MD Oxford Lab expressing considerable interest. We'll see..
I though NOAA was interesred in 2007 when they sent the brand new, fifty million dollar research ship Bigelow on a fourth of July cruise.
No one aboard knew how to operate their state of the art Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) or top-shelf multibeam sidescan sonar.
All the exact locations of reef I'd given the Bigelow were pronounced as 'sand waves.'
Just Wonderful.
I took thirteen scientists and NGOs a few days later and showed em reef with my two hundred dollar drop camera and ninety-nine dollar WalMart VHS tape/TV combo.
Now with Video Ray's ROV equipment aboard on the 27th, I returned to one of the places where I'd fished tube worm in many acre patches 30-some years ago.
We did find interesting soft substrates similar to what the Bass Grounds was once comprised of, but no tubeworms. Very few fish were using the substrate. (Soft marsh peat of long ago will have numerous holes dug by I couldn't guess what and used today by conger eels and white crab. Rock is rock - no holes dug in it. With both substrates it's the hollowed out shelves beneath peat or rock that fish and lobster like best..)
I then ran a long way to Kinsley Construction's Bass Grounds Restoration Reef. There we have numerous concrete pyramids poured by Kinsley's York PA concrete plant. (I invented pyramid molds to capture cement coming back to the plant - waste - wash out. Chris Kinsley? He said 'heck with that' - his guys make twenty pyramids every other day with purpose made cement! They've made A Lot of pyramids!)
Unfortunately, visibilty was harsh. Not impossible - but hard. Had it not been for Video Ray's badass forward looking sonar? We'd have not likely found a single pyramid. With sonar? Pyramids stood out wonderfully.
All deployed by the Tiki XIV, some maybe close to two years old - growth on those we observed was wonderful..
Then I anchored atop a new reef from the pipe unit build in March & April of this spring (2024) - my largest reef build ever. This drop will become "Crystal Ann Brinker's Reef" on our reef charts and is quite healthy already.
I didn't realize I had the boys on a three-pipe unit. Others there are even 10 pipes cabled together. Still, there was no bare concrete - It was all covered in growth. Corals will be along in five to seven years. (I've found the more sea whip and star coral we get growing? The better their spawning production becomes. What used to take 15 years to get modest coral growth is now covered in 6 or 7 years.)
Our last stop was "Uncle Murphy's Memorial Reef" - a landing craft Aberdeen Proving Grounds gave us two years ago innthe Ringmaster Reef Group.
Man. I knew it was going to be a great reef.
Shall be indeed.
Maryland is the only state from Massachusetts to Texas without a marine reef program. Our little nonprofit, the Ocean City Reef Foundation, is it for ocean habitat work. We're at ocreefs.org if you'd care to help.
Cheers,
Monty