The Weekly Salvage
The Weekly Salvage
(9.4.24) Fishy News from Around the Northeast and Beyond
The maritime rule of salvage has its origin in Roman law, which dictates that one who preserves or improves upon the misplaced property of another is owed compensation, even if the service was not requested. Let’s get out the internet trawler and get to work…
🎙️| The Surfcast Podcast - Fishing the Fall Run with Bill Wetzel —> A nip is in the morning air and Bill Wetzel is dreaming of blitzes on white bait. Grab your favorite flannel, a PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte) and listen to Montauk finest stories from the surf.
🎥 | Italian Shore Jigging False Albacore —> Il buongiorno si vede dal mattino…an Italian proverb, quite literal in meaning, says a good day starts in the morning. The Albie game is mostly a winter fishery in the med region, with many enthusiasts targeting ‘shore core’ with heavy jigs on vertical cliff faces in heavy current.
NDYakAngler - Do Bass Eat Roaches? (SPOILER: YES)
Reports | OnTheWater / FishermanMag / SaltyCape / HullTruth / StripersOnline
Local Knowledge: Summer is dead, long live Local Summer. As Bill Wetzel quipped in the podcast linked above, you can just smell the difference in the crisp Autumn dawn and feel a sense of finiteness. It’s no time for desperation, not yet, but it’s a time to take stock of your successes and failures, shore up tackle and PTO supply, and reflect on what goals you want to accomplish before the calendar turn. It’s no secret that September heralds a segment of the inshore and offshore season that is not only historically productive, but uniquely rewarding in the sense that successes are typically ‘earned’. Whether it’s temperamental wedding weather patterns that demand attention, or early sunsets that cut into the ‘reverse commute’ bite, the stakes of each trip off the dock click one grade higher.
Thankfully, it seems the Cape has navigated through the light-tackle tuna dark ages since mid-July. And, while the action is certainly not as medieval as years past, the last few weeks have seen fresh sign of larger rec fish collocating with giants, as well as running the inshore grounds in pursuit of small sandeels, tinker macs, and in rare cases, halfbeaks. The shift in forage focus on a daily basis can mean any number of techniques (jigging, popping, drifting & kiting) can win the day, so an adaptable approach is key, as far from the fleet as you can get. The last few days out hunting Charlie with old friends yielded plot-twists and emotional highs and lows any tuna fisherman can relate to: lightning fast feeds, doldrums of dead water drifting and reconsidering strategy, gutting tackle failures, and last-drift heroics. All the constituents of the toxic cocktail that keeps us coming back for another drink.
Six Steps to Cure Albie Fever (OnTheWater) - “False albacore have cast a voodoo curse on my soul and have afflicted me with an addiction. My recovery has stalled in step one. I have admitted that I am powerless, but I can’t believe there is a greater power that can restore me to sanity. There’s only one way to curb my addiction … and that’s to catch more albies. I have often pondered why I dedicate so much time to chasing these fish. I caught my first false albacore 22 years ago, a day I will never forget. Since then, I have spent countless hours trying to predict their unpredictable patterns. The biggest thing I have learned? Albies are erratic. There is no rhyme or reason to when they show up, and once you think you have it all figured out, everything changes. For me, the quest to solve the albie puzzle, to comprehend their sporadic behavior, is the real hunt with false albacore.”
Redfish Caught off Cape Cod (SaltwaterSportsman) - “On Aug. 15, while targeting striped bass out of Harwich Port, Mass. with Take A Chance Charters, Camden Stride, of Vermont, hooked and landed a 34-inch, 12.65-pound red drum. It was the first salt water fish the angler has ever caught. “It’s like a unicorn, here,” said Capt. Sam Crafts, who operates the charter service off the southern shore of Cape Cod. “We were [striped] bass fishing, and I couldn’t believe it. I saw a school of bass in the rip, and now I don’t know if it was a school of bass or a school of redfish, but I knew it wasn’t a bass as soon as I saw that fish.”
South Florida Swordfishing Tactics (SportFishingMag) - “In Miami, we fish a drop-off between 1,200 and 1,600 feet of water at night. During the daytime, the depths range from 1,600 to 1,800 feet. This area has a ridge with lots of ups and downs on the bottom that in turn create upwellings and usually hold bait. Bait is usually squid, deep-water sardines and sometimes tinker mackerel. Inshore of the ridge is usually pretty flat bottom and offshore of the ridge it drops off to 2,000 feet. The key is to keep your bait near the bottom but avoid snagging the bottom. We usually fish offshore of the ridge in areas with less ups and downs on the bottom, but with areas that do have large humps and depressions. You seem to catch more fish in the front and just behind most of the holes or mounds.”
Secrets of the Tuna King (Game&FishMag) - “To me, trolling takes away from probably the most awesome part of tuna fishing—feeling the line stop mid-jig and suddenly setting the hook on a monster. Then, that wonderful sound of 80-pound braid dumping from a spool fills the air as I scream, “Get the lines in!” And the topwater stuff? Even better. As soon as you pause that popper—KABOOM! A 200-pound-class tuna absolutely murders the thing in a violent crash of water, sometimes feet from the boat. Often, I can’t even get to the throttles in time to prevent losing a good 400 yards of line to a monster fish. There is nothing even remotely relaxing about any of it. It’s an active hunt, and when you connect, the pure, unadulterated battle that follows, unconstrained by heavy, cumbersome gear and harnesses, is unlike anything else in fishing.”
Aussie Lure-maker JM Gillies Taps Artificial Intelligence for New Colors (AnglingIntl) - “Billy Parsons, JM Gillies Product Manager, told Angling International: “While the rest of the world has been on a roller-coaster of up and downward trends in sales and innovation, Australia has been about its business as usual – innovation and brand development has not stopped. We have used real fish patterns and enhanced them through a sophisticated AI generator to produce colours and patterns never seen before.”
Thanks for reading The Weekly Salvage, until next week!
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