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Watch Hill...Right Place at the Right Time

1K views 3 replies 4 participants last post by  jared 
#1 ·
After a late start due to setting the alarm for PM and not AM, I ended up making it down to So. County by around 9:30 am expecting to have missed the best part of the day. Drove first to the West Wall and turned around after seeing waves breaking over the jetty. West wind was supposed to be 10-15...looked more like 20-30 knots. Hopped over to Quonny to see if any albies were around. Nada. Water looked dirty with nothing happening. next stop...Weekapaug. Same thing....nothing. Water was dirtier than at Quonny. Decided to head over to Watch Hll. If anything, I thought I would be able to get in the lee of the wind and practice casting. By the time I got on the water, it was around 11:30 with tide running out. Five casts later....fish on. At first I thought it was an albie, since the fish took me well into my backing. Turned out to be a 38" bass. Not a bad start. Half hour later, some large bluefish starting blitzing up and down the beach. Managed to land one about 10 lbs after getting bit off about half dozen times. Also picked up another bass during the blitz of around 30 inches. By around 2 pm things died down to the point that I decided to break for lunch. Back fishing at around 4 pm. Things were definitely quieter, but with the flooding tide, albies were showing very close to shore. Close enough that if you walked out onto one of the recently formed sand bars you could reach them with a fly rod. As luck would have it, I managed to cast into one pod that showed, hooked up and landed one around 10 lbs. Great day of fishing that I will never forget. Once the migration starts, it can only get better.
 
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#2 ·
Great report Caster and a great day on the water as well. Day's like that always stick in our memory to be reminicsed about for many years to come. We fished yesterday all around Fishers Island and Watch Hill and also found Albies in abundance just about everywhere went. The back side of Fishers Island was very hot and heavy with Albies first thing in the morning. These fish were in tight to the rocks and zipping around the boat for about 2 hours but they vanished mysteriously after that. No reason why either, still plenty of bait and the tide was still moving at a good clip, also there were very few boats around, that is one of the reasons I love to target these fish because you can never figure out what they will do next which gives them a distinct advantage over the other species that we chase. I got a call from Jared who was over by Napatree and Sugar Reef and he said there were Albies crashing over there so we decided to make the run over to that local and give it a shot. There were alot of fish over there as well but the wind and sea conditions made it somewhat difficult to setup on these fish. My friend Al and I boated 10-11 Albies and we also caught bass and blues mixed in with the Albies. The bass and blues are all still on the small side but fun just the same. We had originally started out to sling some eels into the rocks on the backside of Fishers Island first thing in the morning but ditched that plan after an hour or so. We did not even get a single bump on the eels and then the Albies showed up so we concentrated on them instead. All in all a pretty good day of fishing, I wish the weather would calm down for just a few days as it would be nice to get out and not have to deal with big seas everytime out. I still believe that the bigger fish have not made it down our way yet and that November is going to be a banner month if the weather does not screw things up.

Tightlines,
Mike M.
 
#3 ·
Caster - we must have crossed paths at some point. Sorry we didn't meet up. Sounds like you had a great day too. Gotta love a slam from the beach!

Mike - 10 or 11 albies :whoa: I'd say that's better than "pretty good!" ;)

Q
 
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