The Weekly Salvage
The Weekly Salvage
(9.26.24) 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…
🎙️| On The Water Podcast - Scuba Diving and Surfcasting with Bill Cronan —> Cronan is just one of those salts you pull a barstool next to and let cook. An instinctual storyteller with some all-time one-liners, it’s immediately apparent just how passionate he is about angling and Cape Cod. From the exploration of famous wrecks off Monomoy, to Surfcasting the Race, to the best way to frog for Largemouth, this circuitous listen is an instant classic.
🎥 | End Game: Giant Bluefin by Brooksy —> As a long-time fan of Johnny’s videos, when I heard he was back on the Cape filming last month with the Siren & TightenUp team, I had a feeling we were in for a saga of epic highs AND lows. It’s no secret that this year has been a STRUGGLE from a topwater perspective, so it’s not a total surprise that the squad had to drastically pivot to put a bend in a spinning rod. From a cinematic perspective, the film is truly more than a sum of its parts, with so many familiar themes brilliantly woven into one adventure: 1) the mental/emotional toll of trying to put together a bite on a fixed schedule 2) the bonds of friendship that can only be created after a proper live-baiting rot and 3) that sometimes the ‘payoff’ is watching a fish swim off, knowing it got the better of you, knowing you’ve got unfinished business.
Fishing Reports | OnTheWater - FishermanMag - HullTruth - MAFishReport
Tackle Reviews | GearSay - Saltwater Edge - TackleTour - StripersOnline
Local Knowledge: I was struck with a sense of purpose, an instinctual call to action…for I would soon witness a rite of passage. I sat patiently in the church pew, fingers drumming a crisply-folded ceremony booklet, half-watching the wedding officiant deliver the final covenant, half-dreaming of linesiders in raging surf. For I knew not of a more divine marriage than the approaching Nor’easter and the breaking Harvest Moon tide, set to meet the following dawn. Fast-forward 12-hours, a social melee of cocktail hour and reception survived without any reference to the blockchain or barbecued pets in Ohio, and the 4:45am alarm had me giddy on arrival. Its trilling even topped an unironic rendition of Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘September’ on the night of its namesake, which claimed one over-served victim during a round of necktie limbo. A lukewarm mug of Holiday Inn’s finest secured amidst a mumbled hotel checkout, and it was time to saddle up and ride into the teeth of the gale.
Now, I’ve always felt that a particular draw of fishing the surf is the underdog mentality you must adopt, the very same which pervades the pursuit’s over-caffeinated and sleep-starved artists. It takes a rugged belief system, a patchwork quilt of memory, rumor and junk science, to contend with the vast expanse of a boulder field or sand labyrinth in complete darkness. It also takes a certain kind of individual to choose the path of resistance, an increased degree of difficulty, for no other reason than the fire it lights within. And, when shells finally crunched beneath my boots, a lightning bolt framing the horizon of swell, I knew my baptism would be of an Old Testament variety. Thankfully, a good shepherd James Fee of OTW was already triangulating a high-spot on a tide-submerged bar as I found my bearings.
Punching a yellow minnow plug barely 30yds into the surf in front of me, I almost immediately felt the telltale tap of a missed take, threw a subtle twitch into the rod-tip, and was bent to the fore-grip. The transmission of the first Striper head-shakes I’d felt in weeks was deeply cathartic as I contemplated my landing plan in the set of 4-footers curling over the bar. “They’re Here!” I screamed into the salt-spray, completely eschewing the surfcaster’s code of silent capture. It didn’t matter…Jimmy couldn’t make out my squawking from a stone’s throw away, but he too had found exultation in the form of a buck-tail-inhaling bass. For some 15-mins, singles and doubles arrived with regularity, until the bite shut down as quickly as it began.
‘Stick and move’ being the plan to replicate the potential pattern, we caravanned to another remote meeting of outflowing tide and onshore gale, and our wolf pack, it grew by one, with the addition of OTW’s Matt Haeffner. Combing the weed-choked wash with an assorted spread of plugs into the last hour of the tide, it was a group of gulls down the beach that ultimately delivered a crucial clue. Launching airborne off the beach, they slowly circled, hovered, and then dove in a fashion any angler would recognize. We hauled ass across the tidal flats as fast as our leaky waders allowed, and found what I’d been envisioning for some weeks: perhaps not a true foamer, but a self-sustaining group of feeding fish at the surface, somewhere between ruckus and brouhaha on the Wetzel Blitz Scale (WBS).
It was full-contact fishing from first cast, the body of bass drawing us deeper into the swell, while rogue waves made the prospect of lure and leader changes less than ideal. The chaos between breakers was mesmerizing: fish slurping and slapping at peanuts, weaving through the ceiling of white water and flotsam, often ignoring even the best placed plugs. But a string of refusals was always eventually snapped by a bowed rod and manic battle, one shoulder lowered to absorb the impact of an incoming wave, before a frantic retreat to the shallows for a release. Chafed thumbs, salt-swollen fingers, and one bloody digit a victim of a treble-gone-awry, laughter came easier and easier as the tide slowed to a crawl. No trophies were had, but it was a rare slice of Autumnal Striper enlightenment all the same, with a single blurry photo worth more than any professional edit.
Unleashing the Future: How Technology in Sportfishing Tournaments is Transforming the Game (InTheBite) - “Technology on both types of boats has advanced. Nowhere is that more prevalent than in fish-finding, and especially during tournaments, communicating, confirming, and scoring that catch. “‘Flashers’ were early machines used to determine water depth, which then evolved to fathometers, which were paper recorders,” adds Jim Motsko, who with daughters Madelyne and Sasha Motsko directs the White Marlin Open, in Ocean City, Maryland. “Then came video sounders and eventually, ‘Chirp’ technology. Now we have Omni Sonar, which is almost commonplace due to it becoming smaller and less expensive. This has also led to an additional crew member to monitor the sonar.”
72-Inch Tarpon Caught and Released on Martha’s Vineyard (OnTheWater) - “This is not the first time a tarpon has been caught from shore around Cape Cod and the Islands, and it certainly won’t be the last. Just last summer, a land-based shark fisherman caught a 5-foot-long tarpon on the south side of Cape Cod. And, more recently, though distant from Cape, a Rhode Island surfcaster caught and released a tarpon of similar size after it ate a live eel intended for striped bass. And it’s not just tarpon that appear to be slowly trickling north into Massachusetts waters. Less than a month ago, a 34-inch, 12-pound red drum was caught in the rips off Monomoy Island. Maybe someday down the road we’ll be sight-casting red drum and tarpon on the Brewster Flats?”
From Shore to Sea: The Embattled Sea-run Brook Trout of Maine (AnglersJournal) - “As I enter the tidal plain, the setting sun cuts rich, golden beams through gaps in the forest, pin-cushioning the world with subtle warmth. I cross the salt hay, then peer over the slippery edge of the sod bank. Below is a lone pocket of gravel, spotted easily in the transparent water. I slide down to stand on this partially submerged island and quickly start to cast, swinging my fuzzy, homemade streamer through a shallow run. I lose myself to the rhythm — cast and drift, drift and cast. As the day slips away, the first tendrils of the sea start to climb upstream as the tide flips. The pristine fresh water rushing around my knees pushes back defiantly, colliding with the turbid ocean water. Foam and froth swirls and twists, and a jagged, miniscule chop rises at the intersection. Within minutes, the freshwater current from the stream slacks, then reverses, overwhelmed by the tidal flume. I brace against the stronger current, now from the opposite direction, and swing my fly the other way under a blush-and-pumpkin sky.”
What is Really Going on with Bass Tackle Sales? (Wired2Fish) - “The economy was certainly a factor,” they said. “It feels like people are spending differently because everything is so expensive now, so things that are not necessities, like fishing tackle, have been eliminated or scaled back. Fisherman will follow the trends, to some extent. Obviously FFS baits are hot right now, but people have been downsizing baits for a while now. For instance, we haven’t had a deep crankbait or a big spoon bite in several years. That could just be our lake, but the ledge bite has not been as much of a factor for us in terms of product sales in at least 2-3 years.” They are not seeing as many customers come through the doors. And when they do, those people window shop and are very selective with their purchases as compared to years past where they bought a lot of different baits to try a lot of different things. To combat that, they are expanding their product lines, focusing on social media campaigns to reach new people by working with content creators to make videos as photo posts are not working for getting customers into the store anymore.”
The Perfect Pitch Bait (SportfishingMag) - “Pitch baits prove popular from coast to coast. California tuna fishermen, such as Capt. Ty Ponder, a private boat captain from San Diego, use live Pacific sardines. Spanish sardines rank as the No. 1 pitch bait for Florida captains such as Casey Hunt of Key West. A threadfin herring ranks as his second choice. Carter’s go-to pitch bait is a dead ballyhoo, which matches what he’s trolling. “All trolling guys, whether they’re fishing for blue marlin, white marlin or sailfish on the East Coast pitch dead baits, and all live-bait guys pitch live baits,” Hunt says. “Most boats are set up to always troll or always live-bait. But if you’re trolling and you have some live bait, it’s a great weapon.” Whether you pitch live or dead baits, always have a bait ready, and immediately drop it into the water when a fish shows, especially when you already have one fish hooked, captains say.”
Thanks for reading The Weekly Salvage, until next week!
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