Bones at the Hooter and Bonito Bar. No life at The Owl or Gordons Gulley

[28Conquest]

Left Nantucket Harbor at 5:30am through Smith's point and pretty much straight south to check out a temp break about 10 miles out. Found the break, but no life at all. Headed West to the Owl and then on to Gordons - same story. Set lines at Gordons anyways, so at least we weren't just taking a boat ride. After trolling around for an hour with no bait on the finder, birds, or any other fishiness, we decided to save gas and head to the Hooter to see if we could grab some bones.

Hooter had a pretty good sized fleet fishing. TONS of bait and birds - the bait was as thick as I've ever seen it - really cool to see. We did a combo of trolling and casting swimmers on light tackle, but despite the bait, we actually only had 7 or 8 strikes. All but two were bluefish, but we did manage two nice bones. Totally gorgeous day, though the wind started kicking up. Called it a day at 12:30 and ran back to the Bonito bar. Couldn't resist a few more casts and we picked up one more bone plus a bunch of blues that all went back.

All in all a totally fantastic day, and the bones grilled up real nice for dinner. Still trying to figure out the whole South of the Vineyard thing. Being mostly used to Cape Cod Bay & Stellwagen, it seems like there's such a huge area to cover with relatively little structure, and no whales or birds. We felt like we could have burnt gas all day hunting for a needle in a haystack.

Should we have kept blind trolling? Run to the Fingers / Claw / Star / Dump / etc?

[Cape Fisherman]

We did almost the exact same thing Wednesday, Bonito Bar, shoals, Gordons then to the Star. Very little life but huge temp breaks.

You're right, it's a lot of water, they keys are sharing intel and finding temp breaks on structure. We troll in the morning, shark during the day then troll on the way home. Usually guarantees some form of catching.

[28Conquest]

Capefisherman - were you the 35ish foot white sportfish that we hailed at Gordon's? I was on my buddy's boat - white twin outboard center console. How was the sharking?

[Cape Fisherman]

No, we were in the 23 Pacific with the "high tech" upper station. Sharking was great, we took a buddy from NC who had never been sharking. 15 minutes into the slick we landed a lean 56" female mako, released her to breed another day, then got into the blues. Over 30 for the day, my buddy had a blast. Hooked into one on a Penn 950 that made it interesting. Pulling in the last bait we hooked a mako pump which was a good thing to see. On the way home picked up a few mahi under gear. Great day.

[28Conquest]

ha ha - love the tower! was rolling around pretty good yesterday too! WTG on the sharks - maybe we should have tried that instead.