One Sheepshead at CBBT (Sep 30, 2015)

[ComeOnFish]

I had a comp day off yesterday. So I went to CBBT.
The water was cloudy. Somehow cloudy waters haven't worked (almost never) for me. For 5 hours, I had zero bite. No croaker, no black sea bass, and no toadfish. None caught any good fish except few trash fish. None (who fished for tautog/sheepshead) had fiddler crab because bait stores were out of fiddler crab.
I met a yaker who knew me. We jigged for big redfish at the First Island. We saw dark clouds and lightening coming toward us. We were 3 miles off the shore. During lightening, a boater let us stay on his boat for an hour.
I landed a sheepshead at 23.5" on blue crab. That was all.

Fishing log:

Joe

[Dimo]

Sad ending but also funny in a macabre kinda way. Thanks for the recap


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[rwh]

Good video. I think the water will be cloudy even for a while after the storm passes. Hopefully not for more than a few days. At least it wasn't a total skunk.

[ComeOnFish]

The water temp has been dropped by 2-3 degrees per week. It can drop 3-4 degrees per week soon. I think Togs bites improve starting from the Oct 24th weekend.

Joe

[HokieDJ]

Who's in for flounder next weekend? They going to head out soon.

[tufnik]

Looks like you tried not to have a nice dinner, but you did...lol...

Anyway, I'm surprised at the calm water. With the small craft advisories and high wind forecast this entire week, I thought it wouldn't be fishable. Thanks for the report.

[ComeOnFish]

Tufnik,
I don't know why the sheepie gave up. I had it less than a minute on the kayak.

On the piling, I used shrimp first. Without feeling the bites I lost two shrimp. I remembered HokiDJ told me the other day. Blue crab works for sheepies. So I put blue crab. I had a subtle resistance. That was the 3rd bite for the day. I set the hook. But the fish took the rig into a hole (crack). After replacing the rig, I had another bite. The same thing happened. Except this time I took time and finally pried the fish out. Well it was a large toadfish (my personal best at 13.5").
I tried again. This time I thought it was a small toadfish initially. So I didn't try to bring it up fast. The fish went into a hole. I took time and finally pulled it out of the hole. That time the fight started and I thought it was a black drum. I think the sheepie got exhausted while in the water. The sheepie was very calm on my lap. I measured quickly. It was under 24", not a citation. That time I knew that the sheepie wasn't OK. So I decided to resuscitate the sheepie.

Joe

[HokieDJ]

Blue crabs is the bomb. Works on just about everything and last longer.