Pacemaker Fishing Forum

Mo, Jimmy and I got to Tri-State Marine at Deale at 0630 and proceeded to head out of Rockhold Creek behind the Stormy Petrel, Captained by George Prennant....



....to see if the bay was calm enough for us to cross it. This would be the 1st Targa crossing. It was slick calm so we took off for Poplar Island in search of some of the striped ones.

The ride was smooth and pleasant. We hit all of the usual spots on the SW side of the island but we marked very few fish and got ZERO hits. What to do? Rather than head back to Deale, I decided to run down to the mouth of the Choptank River and do some exploring. We saw a lot of boats that were anchored....I suspect they were croaker fishing.

But we decided to try some rip-rap and Mo instantly hooked up and took the skunk off the boat!



He caught two more and then things went silent....no more hits! Hmmm...what's up with this? Now we decided to head back across hoping to maybe get into some breaking fish on the way. Nope! So we went to a point where Mo has scored well in his last 2 outings.....no bites and no fish! Now we are starting to worry 'cause it's getting late!

Now we are back at Deale to work our trusted jetty. It takes a while but we (Mo) gets the 1st hit....



....followed by Jimmy.



It goes on like this for a while with Mo outpacing Jimmy....while I watched. Finally, Mo felt sorry for me and asked to trade rods (an old Carl trick). After a bit of arguing, I relented and he made his 1st cast. While jabbering, he gets NAILED by a huge perch!



13.25"! You are kidding me? It was like rubbing salt into a wound. Unreal is all I could say while Mo and Jimmy laughed until they cried....

The action was now hot and heavy. Jimmy got his biggest perch ever at 11.75" and then followed with one that was slightly over 12". And yes, I started to catch a few as well. We were only keeping the 10" fish....



This one was 12.5"!



Mo then go slammed and we went for a ride as he landed this beauty on an UL and 6lb line....



He was having a good time with this fish! A little later, the same thing happened to me and I was doing the Curly shuffle (walking around the boat) while I tried to land this guy on 4 lb line (UL rod).



This is where we caught these guys today....



We kept 23 fish.....



It was spectacular out today. The bay was flat calm and the breeze was slight.