Got out Friday after work with my son and neighbor, getting to the reef around 5:30, high slack. We tried drifting over the productive area we found the past couple of weeks with the light north breeze but all we managed was shorts.
Broke out the trolling motor and recreated the drift that brought keepers the week before, but again nothing. By now the outgoing has begun so I decided to stop the motor and let the boat find its own fish.
We were picking up some short fluke and Cbass and I was getting plenty of porgy bites but the big gulps were just getting picked at, so I decided to at least have fun with porgies. I switched up my rig and went with the lightweight spinner and put some clam on the hooks while the other two kept at it with gulps and spearing.
Slow drift speed let me find some nice bottom while fishing and just after marking a nice piece of bottom my line gets tight,..am I stuck??, I feel some movement so I set the hook and feel some nice weight. Not a lot of head shakes but it did give me a nice drag pulling run back to the bottom so I’m thinking oh, this is either a nice out of season tog, or maybe something foul hooked. The fish didn’t really fight that hard, or maybe it swam up to the boat but my son was ready with the net and said “ oh dad, that’s a stud!” as the brown mat comes into view. Some tense moments as the fluke didn’t like boat or the net but the kid did a fine job and got it scooped up and flopped it on the deck. High fives all around before unhooking and measuring the fluke at 27 inches, my personal best. The digital scale had some water damage so I never got an accurate weight, but the fat fish had to be atleast 7 lbs.
We kept at it, redrifting the area and had success catching a nice 24 inch weakfish, a few large porgies, and 2 more keeper fluke, one on gulp and one on spearing.
With the sun getting low, I made the mistake of leaving the area to try for bass which proved to be the wrong move as we never even had a bite as the sunset turned to night. It’s taken all season to finally find some quality fluke, and we are glad that it’s happening now to help fill the void before the tog obsession takes hold in October.
