With some big charters on tap in the coming days I decided to take a day and scout some areas I havent fished yet this year. I called an old friend, Tony, whom I worked with in my other life for over 20 years and along with the "Admiral" (my wife Diane) we set out for Stellwagen on 4/23 for a day of groundfishing.
Stellwagen is covered right now with huge schools of sand eels under which are hungry codfish. Unfortunately you have to fish through a lot of shorts in order to find a keeper. Personally I dont like sticking these small fish, as they are the future of our fishery, so I moved along the bank heading south all the time.
Pretty much everywhere we went we found the same, lots of small cod with a nice keeper cod coming aboard every so often. Tony mananged to put this one in the box after it grabbed a green fly that I had tied.
We decided to go in search of some haddock and ended up where I left them on Monday. The Admiral had fun holding onto the bouncing rods as 4-5 lb fish came to the surface. Just before we decided to call it a day Tony, who had the hot stick all day, nailed this beauty.
These are the quality fish I am always searching for and was glad that my good friend found one on the end of his line today.
