Weakfishing Strong

[SWS Regional Reports]

This fishing is getting even more intense. We always catch weakies, sometimes a few, sometimes a bunch, but the fish are quality size, and the diversity of species is incredible....everything eats shrimp. Sunday afternoon I anchored up in Meyer's Hole and started throwing shrimp with the sun high in the sky, a bunch of boat traffic, and mild optimism. The incoming tide had just fllooded in all of that clean green ocean water to this spot. Without a doubt, my favorite conditions to fish here, as the chum slick becomes alive with visual fish. Not just the hickory shad that we see rolling and flashing even in the darker warker, but the whole spectrum. In all we caught 12 species of fish in the two and a half hours we anchored there: weakfish, fluke (inc. a keeper), spots, perch, hickory shad, sea bass, sea robin, blowfish, sand shark, snapper blues, croaker, and a jack crevalle. All on shrimp using six pound test spinning rods. Early on I started using a sabiki rig to target the spots, as it is time to start stocking up on them as live bait for the fall stripers and tuna. I did catch plenty of spots, but I also caught a 24 inch 3 1/2 pound weakie on the sabiki (pic attached). A little while later, my son Nicholas bagged a 17 incher on the same rig. We had a handful of weakfish and the best ones we caught all came on this rig. I will be sure to make this a part of our arsenal now, although when you hook two and three hickory shad on the same rig, things get a little dicey on the ultra lites.

This past Thurs, Fri, and Sat, I fished the west side of the bay as well as Meyer's Hole and each day was different as far as how many weakfish we caught, but we did get them on every trip. The best results are flatlining a weightless, floatless, baited hook into the slick. We are also doing well livelining the spots and peanut bunker on the slightly heavier 10 pound spinning rods with a good size float keeping the live bait suspended right above the eelgrass. Either location will test your endurance with the multitude of species that pick at your bait while you are targeting these big trout, but if you persist, and just keep re-baiting your hook every two minutes, you will be rewarded. Even the live bait rods are high maintenance as the small bluefish chop these baits to pieces, leave that head chunk on for a few extra minutes, though, as we are catching a few nice fish on the remaining chunk. It seems that the weakies are scoffing the remnants of the bluefish attack just as the stripers do out in the open ocean.


Hope to see you on board.

Thank you,

Capt. Dave DeGennaro
Hi Flier Sportfishing
732.330.5674
www.hiflier.com