After a couple of solid months of some very serious Flounder catching action, this past week we have hit our first of what's bound to be more stumbling blocks to come and the fishing we encountered was less then spectacular on several occasions.

We had sort of a double whammy last week, we started the week out pretty decent with good Flounder action but as the week progressed, between the afternoon southerlies and the new moon perigee tides making drifting conditions and holding bottom less than favorable, our catch and our keeper to throwback ratio started to go down the tubes. If that wasn't enough the second half of the whammy came over the weekend with the offshore passing of Hurricane Bill. While we never really got all the hyped up super swells that the Weather Channel promised we would see, we did see some modest swells from Saturday through Monday that were evidently big enough to put the Flounder bite on a serious and frustrating hold.

While Saturday was ultimately the only day that we missed due only to a lack of sponsors, there were a couple other days in my last few adventures that we sort of wished that we had been somewhere other than where we were. Not that the weather was bad, in fact other than a few early morning rain showers a couple of days, the ocean has been pretty flat calm, there was just a long period swell of about four or five feet for a couple of days. If you weren't fishing near a shoal where the waves were breaking you wouldn't even know that there was any swell at all. The fishing over the few days before and after the passing of Bill however have left no doubt for anglers; it just hasn't been too special, there were no big numbers of keeper Fluke landed for me just before and just after the passing of Hurricane Bill.

There has been a little ray of hope however with all of our bum days, even at its worst, we have at times had some good short action with Fluke and we have still managed to catch a few quality sized fish. In just the last three days I have seen three citation sized Flatties and we have had several fish that would weigh over five pounds. We just haven't seen the big numbers of keepers by days end we have been seeing over the last several weeks. I do think we've had a pretty good excuse though and I firmly believe that we will be back into some more of that great fluking that we have been seeing all summer in the next few weeks.

After Hurricane Bill swept us by over the weekend we did notice a slight drop in our surface water temperatures, there were cool spots from the mouth of the Delaware Bay all the way down to the old grounds and beyond. These temperatures have rebounded nicely though in the last couple of days and we are again seeing surface temps reach near 80 degrees in the Ocean and near the Mouth of the Delaware Bay with some pretty clean water to go along with this warm water. Only the fish Gods really know how this is all going to shake out in the next several weeks but with the amount of Flounder around I expect to see a lot more nice fish caught when the conditions are right. I have certainly seen the action getting better over my last three days on the water; today 9/25 has been our best day of catching fish in nearly a week. Just today we landed over thirty keepers and caught easily a couple hundred throwbacks for just over twenty hearty fishermen onboard, several folks landed a limit and we caught our biggest Flounder so far for this year. On Sunday we could barely get a bite and came home with just one 8 plus pound Flounder and we caught very few throwbacks.

Conditions are key you have heard me say it time and time again. We didn't have the best of these to work with for several days in a row but today reaffirmed to me that the fish are still here and we should have continued success with Flounder for a while. New jersey is counting down the days now until their closure in less than two weeks and after September 4th you can no longer legally land a Flounder in New Jersey. Here in Delaware we will be able to land Flounder legally until the bitter end of the 2009-fishing season. I plan on running down to the “old grounds” or out to reef site # 11 daily or out into the mouth of the Delaware Bay if we have to due to weather taking full advantage of these Flounder while they are around. Even when we switch to anchor fishing for the Sea Bass in a few weeks we should still see Flounder being jigged up on a daily basis.

My all day trips will depart at 7:00 a.m. daily and the Fluke will be at the top of the menu. We will also see a few keeper sized Bass and a mix with a few other species of fish but I don't expect to see any big number of Sea Bass until later in September when we start to anchor fish regularly. Half-Day trips will still be running three trips a day until after Labor Day and will be targeting mainly Croakers.

If you would like any more information about trips sailing out of the Wharf or you would like to book a private charter or reserve space on a special trip please give us a call at (302) 645-TUNA.

Until Next Week Happy Fishing!

Capt. Rick Yakimowicz
Thelma Dale V
catchfish@verizon.net