5/11 Reports

By Tom O

Things took a turn for the better today on both the open boat and the charter. Capts. Kirk and Dave did a bit of scouting and were rewarded with better action than they’d been experiencing toward the end of last week.

Capt. Kirk had the open boat aboard the Yankee Patriot, and called the day fair to good overall. He started the morning off in the area that had been producing last week, but after a couple of rather unproductive stops he made a shift of a few miles to the east. There, they experienced good action on two long drifts of about an hour each, catching a mix of cod and haddock. A lot of short cod were around today, which provided fast action but also a degree of frustration for anglers who had to pick through numerous shorts before catching a keeper. David Bayly won the pool with a 12-pound cod.

On the Yankee Clipper, Capt. Dave had a charter and also elected to do some searching. Fishing mostly on the anchor, he located some good schools of haddock in somewhat deeper water than that which he’d been fishing. The action was a steady pick punctuated with action-packed flurries that would last for 15-20 minutes, during which a few dozen haddock and a couple of keeper codfish would come over the rails. If you put the effort in, Dave said, you were rewarded with a nice bag of fish by day’s end. A handful of good-sized cusk in the 10-12lb range came aboard as well. The area that he was fishing was full of life, with whales and gannets feeding on a mix of sand eels, herring, and mackerel. One angler even snagged a sand eel, herring, and mackerel at the same time–the sand eel on the teaser, and the herring and mackerel on two points of the treble hook of his jig!

Capt. Josh has the Tuesday Limited Capacity trip on the Yankee Clipper tomorrow–look for a report in the afternoon!

Willy G.