WELL, just got back to the house and getting ready to head to Kelly's in a little while. Had the pleasure of running into Dave (Dawiggs) this afternoon for the first time and it seemed as if I'd known him for much longer because of this website.
Weird how that kind of stuff works out but hopefully we'll get back at it soon.
Anyways, onto the fishing. The thoughts of running to Va for the fish turned out to be wishful thinking when it turned out that I was pretty much the only one ready for that run. The boat that won and I
think the second place boat ran to the Chesapeake both days...go figure.
At least I had the right game plan in mind right? Well yesterday we started off in between the water towers off Nags head and missed two consecutive stripers behind the boat, one of which was a really nice fish
. After that we didn't have a bite for quite awhile so we ran just north of the Wright memorial and flirted with the 3 mile line. Caught probably 12-15 bluefish (kind of lost count since we weren't keeping them) but 4 of them were definitely citations, and man we thought they were rocks until they got to the boat...what a disappointment. Ended up with a 20#ish striper in that mix. Trolled back right out front of the sand dunes and plucked two equally large stripers out there and a few more blues mixed in and the was it for day one. In this tournament your only allowed to weigh one fish so we had a really tough time deciding which one to weigh. The one we chose came out at 29.3# I think for the day one total which put us 11th.
Started fishing this morning out front of the lighthouse close to the line and caught a decent fish 5 minutes in. Had another bite 15 minutes later and that was it for close to an hour. There was a decent amount of boats there and after we caught ours it looked like the fishing, or catching, had slowed considerably. We went with plan B and ran up to the memorial. Found tons of marks but no fish. As we trolled towards the beach somebody running decided to follow as we found a HUGE group of active birds. Blues everywhere...I don't even know how many we had, probably 10 or so until we got frustrated and left after about 20 minutes. Found out later that the boat that followed was a Carolina Classic docked next to us and they said later that they caught 3 nice stripers in that same group right after we left...DAMN! We went back to where we started and had a single bite and that was it. Weighed a fish and ended up to be 30.5#. That put us in 9th and in the money...although it's not gonna be much of it I'm sure.
All in all I think I was happier with the potential the rest of this season holds. A couple boats we talked to ended up with a good amount of fish in that area we started in, although we did hear of a few skunks. Like I said we were happy with finishing there, having a good time, and staying local in Nags Head vs the Bay...even though I wanted to go North. I took a couple pictures but will have to post them later. I think they are here for a little while at least so yall catch em up.
-Alex
Striper tournament, 12/28-29
Linear Mode
