Yesterday was one of those memorable fishing days. We left the Marina at 9 am, an hour before a negative .7 low tide and stopped to look for jelly balls at the channel buoys. Finding none, we headed to the 40 to catch bait fish, and keep looking for jellies. Surprisingly for such a calm day there was no one else at the 40. After picking up a few pinfish and grunts we sped along to the 60.
There were 8 boats lined up in the usual spots, and we bounced around a few places looking to set anchor over some structure. We brought our first Spade into the boat on my first cast, then caught nothing but porgies. Since the reef buoy was where all the boats were lined up, we decided try our luck at some new spots. Glad we did.
After anchoring up about 400 yards away, the sonar blew up. Fishing the bottom proved pointless as the bait stealers had our number. But there was another school at 25 feet, and it didn’t take long for those curious Spades to come check out the shrimp we were tossing.
For the next hour and a half it was on. The Spades surrounded the boat and fought with each other to get at the bait. This was all visible, as the water was clear down to 20 feet. As soon as we brought one into the boat we were back tossing shrimp, and the fish were there in such number we could have easily caught 50 or more. They were all good size and had our lines zinging. After putting nine into the cooler we noticed we were running low on ice and started releasing them.
The only other action of the day was some monster hitting my pinfish on the bottom and snapping my 100 lb. braid with mono leader within seconds. We later saw a likely culprit when a 10 foot Shark swam up to the boat to see what all the commotion was about. We were like: “yep, that was probably him.”
What was so cool was seeing what the old timers talk about; how the Spades will follow bait up to the boat, and then swarm in. No matter how many of their brethren were taken away in front of their eyes, they kept coming and kept hitting our bait.
