A new dog day, and more fish

As I left off on my last blog, I described how I was recovering from the devastation of having suddenly lost our dog.  Finally after about 7 days of weeping daily like a little sissy schoolgirl, I turned a corner with the grief.  On day 10, my family asked if we could go meet a young dachshund whose family was no longer able to keep her.  And so, a new chapter began as Junebug became a member of our family.

Friday June 8- time to fish.  Conspiring good weather, decent tide time, and recent good fishing were enough to warrant taking a half day off work.  Blair, my youngest- joined me for the quick trip.  The plan was to jet down, prep the boat, have a "guys night", and zip back the next morning to continue getting to know Junebug.  We launched at 2:45 pm to catch a 5:50 pm high tide and paused after dunking the boat to replace one of the rollers on the trailer.  Repair quickly made, we motored out of Wenona and zipped right across Tangier Sound to the same location I had been several times prior, which was due west of Wenona harbor, on the west side of the channel, and about a mile north of the #12 buoy.  Feeling confident that the croaker had completed their transition to readily accepting squid, we did NOT bring any soft crab and instead went with squid and shrimp.  The shrimp- already cooked salad-sized shrimp, work well when the fish get picky, and also they are easy to deal with since you don't need to cut them up.  This would prove to not be an issue on this day.  I cleaned 2 really large squid at the start and that was more than we would need for the afternoon.

The wind was out of the WNW at about 10-15 mph to start at about 3:15 pm, and seas were a steady 1-2 ft, just right with the air temps at about 81F.  Water temp at surface was 73.6F, still unseasonably cool and likely the result of two consecutive cold fronts.  And as has become a regular thing, we drifted past the anchored charterboat(s) and gave them a fishing lesson.  We had to work pretty hard for our catch, as I never could discern a specific pattern.  We caught fish between 28 and 48 ft of water, and it changed with just about every fish.  So, the lesson here was to just drift off the 20 ft shelf into deeper water, over and over, and be ready.  Blair fished half-heartedly and intermittently, which is fine, but the result is that basically we were going with one rod most of the time.  I caught 12 of the 14 we kept.  We threw back maybe two fish, but most that we kept were in the 12-14-inch range, and probably half 13-14.  Nice fat croaker.  We ended a little earlier than I had hoped- at about 7 pm, but the tide was really starting to run out and probably so was our fishing.  The reports of rock, speckled trout, perch, and black drum were all appealing but these would have to wait for another day with more time.  And so, I am already forming my game plan for the next opportunity.