For reasons unexplained, I willfully decided to take a complete hiatus from documenting my 2022 fishing season. Now that I have covid and am forced to isolate for a few days, it's time to give a summary overview of the year so far.
As previously mentioned, my absence has not been due to any particular circumstance or event, other than there simply was not much new or remarkable to write about (that I hadn't already captured). All in all, it has been a pretty good season. I got a late start, having navigated and overcome some issues with my outboard motor (water pump) and camper (toilet). I did manage to get out with my buddy Mark in later April and we put 37 blue cats in the cooler, all from the Wicomico, just south of Whitehaven Ferry.
When I finally did get my boat in the water around the 1st of June, it was game on for rockfish. TJ and I set up in the secret spot at just the right time- 2 hours before peak low tide, and I calculate that to be an hour ahead of the normal tide published for this area. Three minutes after getting our lines in the water, we had our limit of rock, and all nice at 20-22". For the next 50 minutes we continued to hammer hungry rock, nearly all in the 20-24" range (released). This trip was followed by 2 more on the 2 succeeding weekends, each playing out in a similar though not as dramatic fashion, and also with a compliment of nice speckled trout. End of June (had been a really cool spring ,and it finally warmed up) I finally had an off-day.
The remainder of the summer was made of mostly (but not always) good trips, with limits of rock and some specks mixed in. August started with closure of the rock season from the 1st to the 16th. The only other out of the ordinary thing I did was in the face of a weekend of overwhelming wind- I fished back in Laws Thorofare, coming in from the Manokin side (take a right at that last fork, dummy). I caught some rock on the way in from the river. The Thorofare produced for a brief 10 minutes- right at the tide swing and where I could pitch the bait to a protected area. I need to remember to exploit this and explore this more in the future, as there are some other nice pockets to hit.
I'll end this with a show from an outing on Sept 10 with TJ and his buddy Tyler. We caught 3 keeper rock, all within a 15 minute window. Here is TJ putting his 19" keeper in the boat:
