Captain's Table Montauk Mats

Planned a crew trip with my good friend Paul for today but a last-minute health issue caused him to cancel. I simply couldn’t not pass up a perfect forecast so I made the Montauk run solo.

My recent local intel was telling me the bite was a little better on the northern and eastern rips. Since we found a kind of spotty bite on the 7/3 trip to my drops south of the point I decided to start the day with an hour of the flood tide at the Elbow. No more than 2 minutes into the first drift I land a 19” keeper and figured I would do a lot better plus I always like the good karma of returning smaller fish. Back he goes and the next couple of drifts gives up a couple more shorts and a few small Sea Bass. Then all of a sudden despite the fact it was still mid tide, the Sea Robins attacked with a vengeance. After 4 drifts and about 20 minutes of double header birds I cried uncle and headed south.

First stop was my mid depth drops in about 75’ of water where I caught so well with several DD Fluke over the past 3 years taken here. However, this year it seems the nice Fluke have decided to find new haunts. Took a few more shorts and one keeper Sea Bass before deciding it was time to move further south to the 95’ drops where I took a Fluke close to 9# less than 2 weeks ago.This proved to be the best call I could have made. First drift I get a huge hit, battle what I knew was a heavy Fluke, and soon an 8.5# fish was flopping on the deck. Next drift anther big hit and this time a 7# fish goes in the box. Third drift and this time is a 6.5# Fluke that found my bait. Started losing the tide at this point and the action shifted over to more Sea Bass but decent 2-3# fish so I quickly filled my limit on the Bisquits. Even found a stray but very tasty Whiting interested in my Nuclear Chicken Gulp worm! Knowing I had a 2-hour run back to the dock I set a limit of just 30 more minutes before pulling the plug. I readjusted my drift line with the change in tide and sure enough I get one more huge thump and soon after a beautiful 6# Fluke fills out my limit. Interestingly only one Fluke took the Nuclear Chicken worm while the other three all fell to a Sea Robin Stirp/Spearing combo. Guess they wanted the meat today.

While I have been fortunate enough to land larger individual Fluke on several trips over the years, I cannot recall ever filling out a limit with 4 serious quality fish ranging from 6-8.5#! That’s why I never seem to mind the pre-dawn starts and 2 hour steam to some of the best quality Fluke fishing we have available on LI. I sure hope that pod of fish hangs around a while as I can’t wait to head back to the south side for another crack at the “Montauk Mats”!!

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