:) Middle Ground

Great report Jay! Glad to hear the motor running well. Nice big tog to boot! I was out for a few hours also on saturday, but my temp reading was 58?

Yesterday, my son Charles and I , despite the cold weather and my son not feeling well took a trip to Middle ground.

We put the boat in the water around 9am, there was ice and frost everywhere on the boat so we waited for the sun to do it's magic and melt it off.

This is the fist time my boat was launched in weather this cold, the engine cranked really slow and I was worried it wouldn't start, but it did so off we went.

Wind was out of the SE and was about 9 mph, we made it over to middle ground in no time and found several PB and rec boats, I looked at my chart Saturday morning and I had
a piece of real-estate I thought would be productive, Having plotted in the location I began to use my side scanner for suitable rock piles, I found a couple and decided on one in particular.

Dropped the hook over and tried to position the boat as close as I could, it didn't take long before the first fish was in the boat, I huge porgie my son caught, we were using light tackle spinning outfits with 10 lb braid and tog jigs, the next fish in the boat was and undersize tog of 15 in's so back it went, this went on for about 40 minutes when I decided to make another move.

I went to the second spot I marked and again tried to position the boat the best I could, dropped our lines down and my son hooks up and I knew for the fight he was into a decent tog.
Gets the fish up and sure enough a keeper tog of 18 in's, congrats Charles nice fish, then it was my turn, a nice fat 17 in keeper, my son hooks up again and this time it's a 19 in cbass.

Then the porgies moved in again, but the big tog were still there, we bought 6 dz crabs and they were all small for some reason, so I just used them whole.

My next fish in the boat was another keeper tog of 18.5 inches, then another 17 in tog, I got my limit, my son in the meantime was still getting harassed by porgies and we were going through bait rather quickly, I tossed another whole crab over and it was taken immediately and I set the hook, a nice 5lb tog, so I told my son we have one more tog to go, you need to use whole crabs or the porgies are just going to keep taking those half pieces your using, so he uses a whole crab, drops down gets a good hit and the fight is on, few minutes later he lands a nice 6.5 lb keeper, wow what a day.

We left them biting and decided to run back to Milford and look for the bunker pods, around 2pm the wind died right down and the water was like a lake, I ran the boat back to Charles Island at full throttle to see how the engine was running, needless to say by the time I got to where the bunker pods were my hands and face were numb lol.

The motor didn't skip a beat, arriving at the nearest bunker pod, pod ha!, the school stretched from Stratford to New haven, they must be ready to make their migration, there are just to many bunker and nothing pushing them, well at least where we were. The only thing we saw were to seals right in the middle of them, I bet those seals are fat as hell .?

Anyways, we ended up with 6 keeps to 6 + lbs 2 nice cbass and lots of short tog in the 15 in range all shorts released unharmed, the water temp by the way was 48.9 degrees, that's a big drop considering last weekend it was 58.

Next weekend is supposed to be in the 60's, we will just have to wait and see how that plays out.

Tight Lines
Jay