Solomons Pier Report - 5/12/2011

Me and a buddy played hooky from work on Friday and decided to do a croaker run at Solomons pier. We left home around 6:30 pm (without bait) in hopes of hitting the pier around 8:30Pm. We made our stops along the way and realized we may be in trouble bait wise. Normally we skip bloodworms in favor of Squid for croaker fishing. It has always been the bait of choice for the past several years. This was proving to be a bad decision. We stopped by several gas stations and 7-11's along the way and lo and behold no frozen squid. You know the stinky boxes that fall out of every bait freezer along the east coast during fishing season...

We hit a total of 7 spots looking for the frozen block of goodies and no one had any. I guess the bait delivery's are behind this week. Now at everyone of these stops we passed up buying bloodworms thinking squid was the only ticket (more to come on this later). After 45 mins of driving around we found a giant open and ran to the seafood section. In the back of the freezer was a lovely bag of calamari. Tubes and tentacles nice and clean and ready for the pot. $10 dollars later we had 2 lbs of pre cleaned squid ready to catch. We got to the pier around 9:30pm and camped out on the right section of the T. First cast got immediately hit but the fish dropped it. Great the squid is the ticket......


Not


We soaked squid for the next 2 hrs with nothing. A fellow fisherman next to us was packing up and gave us his leftover bloods. We thanked him and my buddy placed one on a hook and out it went. 5 Min's later we had our first fish in the box.


Duuuuuuuhhh

We spent 45min searching for and 2 hrs soaking a bait that was not on the croakers menu that night. My buddy jumped back into the truck and went to buy more bloods.

We ended around 3:30am with 17 croakers in the cooler. The biggest went 14" with the majority around the 10" to 11" mark.

Moral of the story....

Don't rely on one type of bait. Always bring an alternative........

[surfdog]

a month ago i bought some large fresh squid and 2.5 lbs of shrimp. cleaned the squid and cut up the shrimp to bait size. bought some regular salt, about 6 containers at 50 cents apiece from the box and save. salted them separately for 3 days and they have been in my truck ever since only 10 bucks and it might last me all summer. so now i have a choice to offer bws, shrimp and squid.

[plastic boat]

Think ---- night crawlers.

Last year I took my nephew croaker fishing in the Eastern bay I used Bloods,Squid and shrimp. He used night crawlers because he said my bait would bite you or just smelled fishy. Anyhow he out fished me. He landed well over fifty, Me---14. He had $3.00 in bait I had over $20.00

Sometimes it takes a kid to make you remember things about fishing you have forgotten. I now remember white perch fishing with night crawlers and catching lots and lots of croaker

[DOGFISH]

It is the "moral of the story." Last year I was going fishing and forgot to get croaker bait. For me that is blood worms. I did not feel like going back out to get the worms. So I broke off a chunk of frozen krill shrimp, which I feed to my tropical fish, African Cichlids. I like to take some bait along for hardhead in the summer. So if the striper bite is off, I have an alternative. The krill proved to be deadly. It also out fished the fish bites that I had with me. The krill are a little softer than blood worms but worked very well in a pinch. I had to be a little faster on the trigger. However, the fish tended to inhale the bait faster than with bloods.

If I knew that I had some fish bites left, I probably would not have taken along the krill. So the moral of the story here is that sometime mistakes pay off big time. Of course my favorite hardhead bait of all time is live grass shrimp. However, with bay conditions the way they are these days, it is difficult to net enough for a trip. I can remember when a few dips or runs along a grass bed would net enough grass shrimp for a full day of fishing. Of course, that was a moral of the story a few thousand times removed in the past.