Location: Long Sand Shoal, Eastern Rip, Outer Hatchetts Reef
Date: 9/21/08
Since the season was winding down on Cedar Lake we decided to take the boat out of the water last weekend and make a trip to the sounds for some striper, bluefish, and porgy fishing before we dropped the boat off at the marina to be winterized. We launched out of the Baldwin Bridge launch in Old Saybrook aroun 5:30AM, but didn’t make it out into open water until 6:45AM since the fog was in thick and visibility was only about 5 feet!
At one point a 50 foot boat crossed in front of us about 10 feet off our bow and we barely saw it. Thank god for GPS otherwise we would have never made it to the sound… As soon as the sun came up the fog burned off and we were able to open it up and head out to the eastern rip. We three way’d eels on two rods and and fresh bunker chunks on one rod from 30-50 feet. Almost immediately we hooked up with a nice bluefish that gave a pretty good fight and weighted about 12 lbs on the boga grips.
Here is a shot of my friend Robbie with his catch:
We had 2 or three more big hits on the eels, but nothing else was boated on the rip. The fresh bunker was left untouched the whole day. After an hour of drifting we moved to Long Sand Shoal to try our luck, but nothing was biting there either.
A short trip to Outer Hatchetts Reef and we were drifting live eels and bunker chuck with no success again. At this point the tide went slack and we decided to switch into porgy mode catching 20-30 porgies and about the same number of small black sea bass using clams and squid. It was coming up on lunch time so we decided to tube and worm with t-man custom tackle tubes and sandworms up the shoreline back to the dock and dine, but never had a strike on those either. We ate lunch and headed back out to the eastern rip and tried our luck with our last couple eels.
We hooked up pretty quick when we got back to the rip, but it turned out to be a skate.
It was getting late and the sun, water, and fishing had beat us up all day, and we still needed to scrub down the boat and drop it off at the marina, so we headed back to the launch.
Overall we had a fun day, even though we didn’t have the best luck…
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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October 4th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Here is a question I received from one of my readers:
NEW TO THIS AREA ON THE SOUND, I KNOW OF HATCHETTS, AND SAND SHOAL, BUT CAN YOU TELL ME WHERE THE EASTERN RIP IS LOCATED?
Here is my answer I set back to him:
Eastern rip is at the end of western edge of long sand shoal, it is where the water is choppy from the sound meeting the CT river and from the current coming over the edge of the shoal…
Thanks for the question ED…