07/26/2022 | 41″ Cobia From The Surf

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6vBBlmXLcg

We had another line of very heavy rain roll through neck of the woods this afternoon and evening which dropped large amounts of rain. We didn’t see much lightning or wind, but it was quite the deluge for a little while. Thankfully it cooled things down a bit and the next couple of days actually look very nice as far as the wind is concerned.

Got a cool pic from Fenwick Tackle today of Tyler Adams who used a piece of cut kingfish to land this huge 41″ cobia from the beach in Ocean City. It was a great catch and of legal length on top of it.

I don’t think many from the offshore fleet got to the deep today thanks to the leftover weather, but the party boat fleet did get to the sea bass and flounder grounds. Captain Chris Mizurak of the Angler reported a decent sea bass bite on today’s trip with a few flounder mixed in.

Captain Monty Hawkins of the Morning Star got hit with some heavy rain on today’s trip…thankfully fish were cleaned and all was tightened up.

Bit of well-behaved ground swell remained as we cleared OC inlet this morning. Found an occasional spell of less than ideal visibility in haze also. Aside from that a fine day for fishing was had. They bit too.

Ms Holly gave today’s blocks a mighty heave; Mr Van a terracotta pipe unit. Both have now become substrate for our temperate corals.

It used to be I would expect sea whip (a soft coral, usually orange, that resembles a grass meadow in its densest growths) and star coral (our only hard coral; classified as a non reef building coral from back in the days when Charles Darwin himself was attempting to understand land formation. Sure, we know continents have been sliding around since forever. They didn’t. There were discoveries of coral and shell fossils on many mountain tops. Did land just grow from the sea? And because our star coral didn’t seem robust enough for land formation, it was classed as ‘non reef building.’ It’s just not big. A whole assortment of reef loving animals, including fish, find star coral quite reefy to their needs, but not to NOAA’s satisfaction.. There’s a big pile of money too, but only for tropical “reef-building” corals.)

What I started to tell readers was that our corals used to take over a decade to colonize new substrate – now that’s happening in half the time because we’ve created denser spawning colonies at each of our reef sites.

Gary from up Schwenksville PA hit the daily double – he won the fish pool and reef raffle; boxed up plenty for dinner too.

And on the way back in?

A full fledged deluge; a blinding rain which all radar could not penetrate.

Fishing and fish cleaning done, at least it’s timing was perfect.

Cheers

Monty