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…

Two weeks ago we were in the midst of a heatwave and there was not a cloud in the sky, but today the fog was so thick we only had about 20 feet of visibility when we launched the boat (see photos below). The last time we fished together all of our fish were found on structure and in shaded areas, but today there was not much to be found on structure or under docks (we went 1 for 6 on the fish we had hooked up).  I decided to fish the same weed beds that we fished last night with my parents and Erik, and it turned out to be a very good choice.

We immediately started catching fish off the grass.  After catching 4 or 5 smaller fish in a couple minutes, Brian got a strong hit and a nice bass came flipping out of the water. I put my pole down to give him a hand landing the fish.  This bass was strong and Brian could barely budge it in the weeds, he jumped 3 more times over the next 2 minutes and I finally got a hand on him and brought it into the boat. It weighed roughly 5lbs and was about 22.5 inches. We snapped a pic with Brian’s cell and released her to fight another day.

Check out that hog in the fog… (Click To Enlarge)

The fun didn’t stop there though.  Right after Brian caught that fish, the area lit up with bass busting on schools of bait all around us.  Everytime we cast to a school of baitfish we caught a bass sitting under them.  This went on for about 30 minutes, and it didn’t matter what we were throwing.  We got them on senkos (texas and wacky rigged), yozuri banana boats, and spinnerbaits. We landed about 20 keepers, including one smallmouth, and then they turned off just as quick as they turned on.

We fished until about 1130a and then a rain storm came through so we went back to my house to play some mariokart wii. We went back out around 230p and fished for another 90 minutes before a nasty super cell went over the lake dropping the temp 15 degrees and bringing torrential downpours prompting us to call it a night. We did manage another 8-10 fish before the rains came, but nothing overly note worthy, but i did catch a huge red eyed rockbass.

MEATY LITTLE GUY (Click to enlarge)

Despite the weather we had a great time, and its always fun spending some time on the water with friends (it sure beats working)… Looking forward to doing it again soon…

Conditions:

Foggy, rainy, windy, water temp 74 degrees