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Long Sand Shoal – Eastern Rip Bluefish

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 23:34:12 +0000

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…

Summer Fun, Fishing and Skiing, Cedar Lake June 11th-12th 2008

admin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:43:09 +0000

I am going to combine the last two days out on the lake into one since there wasn’t all that much fishing action… We were going to go tubing and waterskiing on Friday, but Buddy backed out, so with only one licensed operator Kate, Robbie, and Myself decided to go fishing for a little while. We got on the water at about 6:30pm and fished senkos over the submerged weeds on the north shore. We all landedd fish very quickly and we knew it was going to be a decent night.

The fish weren’t large but we caught quite a few and we didn’t have to race all over the lake to find them. In all we landed about 20-25 bass in the 2 hours we fished. None of the fish were real large, but it was still nice catching something. The largest was about 2lbs (Robbie got it on a senko). He wanted a picture of his “trophy” bass, so we snapped one with his phone. He thinks he looks like a fish model in the picture, you be the judge…

The next night we decided to try again and finally got everyone over for some skiing action… On the boat was Me, Kate, Erik, Jeff, Buddy, Robbie, and Jack. Out of everyone Erik was the only one to get up on the skis this day… Tubing is a different story, I could not be thrown, but everyone else took some good diggers.

Here are a couple shots from the day on the water:

Erik skiing:

Here is a shot of jeffs leg after hitting the water hard!

Once we were done abusing ourselves tubing and skiing we decided to rig up the poles and go out for some late night catfish… We tried stink bait nuggets, hotdogs, and night crawlers, but the only thing we caught was a buzz… By 11:30pm we called it a night.

Cabelas, Tubing, Skiing and Fishing. Cedar Lake June 29th 2008.

admin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:28:34 +0000

I finally made it to the new Cabelas in East Hartford, CT this weekend. My friend Buddy and I made the trek up there with visions of aisles and aisles of fishing gear dancing through our heads, but that turned out to be only a figment of our imagination. The trip up was stressful since there is absolutely no signage to find the place, and the Putnam bridge on route 3 is closed for repairs on the weekends. Even when you get onto silver lane (the road that Rentschler Field and Cabelas is on), there is absolutely NO signs for Cabelas. After driving past Rentschler and going a good 2 miles down the road we stopped and asked for directions. We were told to turn into Pratt and Whitney and Cabelas would be down there.

The first sign you see is on the road directly in front of the building, which is completely idiotic since you have already found the place by the time you get a sign directing you where to go. Once inside the store, the experience wasn’t much better. The layout was awful with nothing where you would expect it to be, the prices were high, and the selection of fishing equipment was sub-par and disappointing for being such a large store. I did however manage to spend $75 on lures, and they also had a couple nice tackle bags on sale which I picked up.

I will not be making special trips up there, but may stop in if I am in the area or I’m at a Huskies game. I would much rather order my stuff from Bass Pro Shops. I wish they would build one in CT since the closest is in Foxboro MA, next to Gillette Stadium.

Once we got back home we decided to have a couple friends over to go out on the lake and go tubing, skiing, and fishing. We got out at 5pm and started tubing, Kate and my friends Jeff and Robbie got out on the tube and had some fun… I couldn’t go today since no one else had a license to drive the boat, but the summer is young and I will have plenty of time to get out on the water. Jeff tried water skiing and was successful in getting up one time but once he was up he didn’t know what to do so he just fell down before he got hurt.

After skiing we decided to hit the grass mats on the north end of the lake with some senkos. We each caught quite a few fish (all largemouth), and it didn’t really matter what color we threw or if it was wacky rigged or texas rigged. The fish have been holding tight onto the weedlines and really have not ventured into the shallows, and haven’t been congregating near docks and structure like you would expect on the hot days. I also threw a couple topwater lures and landed a couple fish.

We decided to call it a night when some idiot buzzed at 40 mph and stopped right in front of us only to fish over our lines since he saw us catching fish. This has been happening way too much this season, and something really needs to be said at our next board meeting.

Overall we had a lot of fun, and it was nice that the storms held off and gave us enough sunshine to take part in some watersports.