Pacemaker Fishing Forum

Happy Birthday to my brother Arturo!

OK...now that I took you off the subject I need to say that I am sick....sick that all the fishing pictures that Jimmy Rekas and I took today were deleted somehow. I should blame him (more on that later) but I think it happened when I dropped the camera on the floor. Every picture we took before that ...GONE!

What a ride! I will try to paint the picture for you with words. Suffice to say, we had a great day an many respects!

I picked up Jimmy at 0445 and after a quick stop at Mickey D's, we were on the roads to Truxton Park, Spa Creek, Annapolis MD. We made great time and we were on the water by 0640.

We slowly motored out of the creek and headed over to the Naval Academy wall. It was slow there but I managed to catch two white perch, both in the 9" range. A cool thing happened while we were there. We saw the new Plebe Class get their 1st indoctrination to PT. It was impressive to see that many students running and doing push ups. They only have 4 more years to go!

OK...off to the next spot which was right across the Severn and the Academy. But as we got closer, there was a guy crabbing pretty close to the wall so we decided we didn't want to fool with tat situation so off to spot #3...the very same spot that Mo and Dan had a killer 2 hours a few days back. As soon as we got there, I hooked into another horse perch by the wood wall and then hooked into another one right where the rocks begin. I announced to Jimmy that I had a 4-0 lead. Obviously, that did not sit too well with him and he started catching perch.

All of the sudden I hear a yelp and Jimmy is hooked into a nice fish! A rock? Nope...a giant perch....maybe 12", maybe more but we will never know because Jimmy did a Jimmy and brought the fish up too close to te rod tip.....see ya! We will never know the size but it was the biggest one of the day for sure.

While we were at that spot, we made several drifts but the wind was playing havoc with my boat. How I wish I had a trolling motor on the bow!

The weatehr guys had said that it would blow 8-11 from the North and that the bay would have seas of 1'. Wrong! The wind was 10-20 with many gusts at 20. I will tell you about the waves later.

Our perch count was 28 (15-13 in favor of Jimmy) with NO perch under 8.5"! Most were in the 9-10" range with several topping 11"! Every fish was a keeper (not Carl's type of keepers)!

Part of today's plan was to go over to Kent Island Kayaks to pick up my yak (by boat). They had installed the fish finder for me.

Here is where the waves come in. I expected 1 footers and we were greeted with 2-3 footers. We got banged up and very wet on the ride down to Poplar island. The wind had picked up and fishing was not going to be fun except that i remembered that the south side of Poplar has some decent water so we motored south another few miles. What I found was a unique color change. On the west side there was clean blue water and on the east side there was green cloudier water. All instincts say to fish the clean water. Fish don't care about instincts. I started marking fish in the green water and we started catching stripers...on every drift except the last one. We caught the bite at the middle third of an out going tide. We caught 17 stripers (11-6, Rojas gets the nod). These fish were hungry and feisty!

The biggest was 21" and out of the 17, seven or eight  were keeper size. Most of the others were close but we did have 2-3 little guys. When the tide got close to low, the bite shut down so we motored up to Kent Narrows to get the kayak. Once we did this, we slowly made our way out of the narrows (north this time) to head on back.

It was No Wake for quite a while but once out of the Chester River, we were able to get going at 22-23kts or so. We passed under that Bay Bridge (my 1st time) and headed into the Severn so we can get back to the ramp....but not before I headed us over to the WP honey hole. We got there and we found dead low tide and no fish except....a big ray that nailed my lure. I thought I was stuck on a rock but the rock kept moving. I asked Jimmy to start the motor so we could chase this beast. I only had 4 lb line on this reel! We successfully fight the beast fr a while but he turned on me and the line broke. That was a cool way to end the day because we were tired and we still had to get on the road to fight the traffic on the way home.

Guess what? We left Truxton Park at 4:30 PM and in less than 90 minutes, we were in Herndon....NO traffic!

Today was cool in many ways including the fact that I burned 1/2 a tank of gas......well, maybe not so cool! My boat's tank holds 85 gallons!

I will end with some sightseeing!