Fishing Around: Keeping It Reel With Fishing Friends
I write a lot about fishing and catching in this column, but the best part about fishing is the time spent on the water with family and friends. In fact, we named our family’s boat, Chuckwagon, after my father with whom I have spent thousands of hours together either on the boat or driving to or from fishing trips. This month, I’ve spent a lot of time with friends on the water and heard about new babies, new businesses, new houses, and tough losses. I’ll remember these conversations for years longer than I will the flounders we flipped into the boat.
Among those friends, I joined Kevin Fillipone and brothers Matt and Joe Roszkowski on the Islander, their 36-foot Buddy Davis center console, for our first offshore trip of the season on July 3. Traveling under a moonless sky and across a calm ocean, we arrived at the Wilmington Canyon before 7am. Pulling medium ballyhoo and squid spreader bars, we trolled from the tip toward the East Notch, where we encountered hundreds of marine mammals feeding in rips created by strong currents colliding against the steep canyon wall. The two-toned common dolphin swam alongside our boat and tucked under the bow, as curious about us as we were about them. The larger Atlantic spotted dolphin surfed through the rips, leaping out of the water and landing with massive splashes. The more sober pilot whales surfaced regularly along the canyon wall for air before returning down to feed schools of squid. More important, the tuna soon found us, blowing up on baits behind the boat and demolishing the white squid spreader bar that I had built the day before. Over the course of the morning, we caught five yellowfin tuna, two of which Joe bled, gutted and packed in ice for a 70-mile commute back to Avalon.
A week later, John Dougherty, Chris Fallon and Dean Vetsikas joined me for a few hours of flounder fishing. Our Episcopal Academy class of 1998 mini-reunion started in a shallow creek, where we reminisced and swatted hundreds of greenhead flies before we retreated toward Paddy’s Hole, where a sea breeze kept the bugs at bay. The product of a Greek seafaring tradition, Dean caught at least a dozen flounder while the rest of us tried to catch up. Collectively, we polished off a pint of minnows, two packs of Gulp!, and a lifetime of stories before we all agreed that we needed to get together again soon.
Nev-R-Enuf Sportfishing’s Capt. Mike Smith had suggested that flounder spot to me. One of the great young captains in our area, Mike has the back bays behind Avalon absolutely wired. While amateurs like me picked a few fish, Mike found flounder in the narrow and shallow channels that drain vast mud flats. By the time you’re reading this, he will have followed the flounders’ seasonal exodus into the ocean. August is a great time to explore local artificial reefs, including the Townsends Inlet, Ocean City and Wildwood reefs. In addition to flounder, Mike’s charters catch croakers, porgies, weakfish and sea robins on both bucktails and bait around the sunken ships, tanks and reef balls.
Beyond the artificial reefs, local anglers venture farther offshore in search of doormat flounder. Gary Twiggs and Capt. John German let me tag along a few summers back as they explored coral heads and other hard-bottom spots near the Sea Isle Ridge. We caught a few nice fish that morning bouncing bigger bucktails and Gulp! in 60-80 feet of water. This summer, I’m excited to explore new spots around high flyers and flags that mark fish pots below. I’ll bring a heavier spinning rod with a live eel or a Hogy ready for the cobia that seemingly appear out of nowhere in August. The cobia, a delicious brown fish with a catfish’s face and a shark’s body, are curious about boats and buoys and wary of baits and lures. When you hook one, find a safe place to put it in the boat, as they thrash violently when landed. I’ll also be looking for small dolphin (mahi-mahi) around the high flyers and buoys in area waters. They’ll eat small bucktails, live minnows and flies – just ask Capt. Joe Hughes, a local guide who specializes in saltwater fly fishing. The reward for preparing so much tackle for these trips are fish tacos for your entire family!
The biggest news in fishing this summer is the resolution of the yearlong federal lawsuit regarding the outcome of last August’s White Marlin Open. The crew that caught the largest white marlin in the Ocean City, Md.-based tournament was to receive $2.8 million in prize money. However, questions arose as to whether the winning crew had started fishing before the tournament’s official “lines-in” time. Furthermore, the results of tournament-required polygraph tests only clouded these issues. The tournament subsequently filed an interpleader lawsuit, asking a judge to decide whether the Kallianassa crew’s alleged improprieties had violated tournament rules and therefore disqualified it from receiving the prize money. When the judge disqualified the winning white marlin (the only qualifying white marlin in the tournament), tournament rules transferred a large portion of the white marlin prize money to the crew that caught the largest tuna. The crew of the Hubris already had won $767,091 for a 236-pound bigeye tuna and now will receive an additional $2 million on account of a recent settlement. As a legal business development consultant and a fisherman, this case was far better than anything Ed Koch’s People’s Court could concoct and I think that the judge got it right.
Nonsense like this keeps me away from fishing tournaments, but I still like to fish with great crews, including my longtime friend and Episcopal classmate, Capt. Stew Hitchner, whose charter boat, Pez Machine, won more than $1 million in tournaments in a decade. Last September, he and his wife, Allison, invited me to fish on their last trip before they moved their young family to Kona, Hawaii. We arrived in the canyon at gray light, deploying six small ballyhoo and two enormous squid spreader bar teasers. That morning, we caught two out of the three white marlin that came into the spread, and were stoked and thinking about lunch when a fin popped up behind the left long rigger bait. Doug, Stew’s brother, beat the fish to the rod, deftly hooked the fish, and handed the rod to Allison. For 20 minutes, we chased this mystery fish around when a 250-pound blue marlin erupted behind the boat, taking another 100 yards of line with it. We quickly realized that this was our first and last opportunity for Allison to catch her first Atlantic blue marlin, albeit on 20-pound test line and 60-pound fluorocarbon leader. Four miles and more than an hour later, I grabbed the leader, ensuring not only an official release for Allison’s blue marlin and but also an appropriate coda for Stew’s successful New Jersey career. This summer, he’s already tagged and released a 750-pound blue marlin working in the cockpit of the Kona-based Sea Genie, the only boat to have caught four 1,000-pound “grander” Pacific blue marlin.
Summer’s not over yet! Get together and fish with friends and family over the coming weeks.