November 23, 2016 – Oh, If I Had a Kayak on My Back Instead of 20 lbs. of Plugs...

The morning stats.  Too old for this crap....

I hit the outgoing tide in the dark on Wednesday, tossing big wood at the 3 AM flood tide until the sun came up.  There was no surf action to speak of, and even out on the bar in crystal clear and calm water, I saw no signs of life until after sunrise.  Sometimes, you can even smell bunker when they are nearby (I swear, you can!) but all my senses were tuned and found nothing alive in the dark but a foul-hooked northern stargazer and the silhouettes of a couple dolphins or porpoises.  About an hour before daylight, I switched to a smaller SP minnow, but I was starting to see that with all the beach replenishment and nary a wave (plus at least a week of NW winds) there was no soft structure on an old favorite stretch of beach.  Even being mostly out of the game for a couple years, my instincts are okay, though.  In the dark, I drew boot lines with my heal at what looked like promising spots, and even though no one was home in the dark, at false dawn on my walk back down the beach, I could see that I had marked some minor cuts and points in the mostly uniform bar.  I am glad people’s houses might be saved after the next super storm, but dammit, I want my rocks and cuts and sloughs back!  Even bait guys are walking waist deep out on the bars to launch bunker chunks to water deep enough to sustain life when no blitz is present or the tide is not at its peak.

Just half a football field too far, even belly deep on the bar!

Speaking of blitzes, at sunrise, a huge blitz materialized almost out of nowhere.  Hundreds of gulls and gannets were having at a big school of peanuts.  At one point, they looked like they may come close enough to reach with a pencil popper or even a snag hook (I had it all in my heavy-ass plug bag), but they ended up splitting in two and heading northeast and south, staying at least 50 yards too far to reach.  I am always considering a kayak before I get too old and cautious for a beach launch in late November, but a kayak only would have helped today if I was dragging it with me all morning.  My boy Dolf wants to get out on a boat, and I might be game, as two weeks in a row, I saw schools of migrating bass just out of reach.  This does not mean I won’t be back on Friday (and Monday) after resting the elbow and the legs for a day or two!