Marlinmate report for 8/29 & 8/31

[Marlinmate]

Fished out of Pirates Cove, NC on Wednesday. It was a Longgggggg day. I saw a smelly black varmit with a white stripe run all over the boat. Not one bite, not even a nibble. Most of the fleet had a tough day as well. A dozen or so whitey's were caught amongst both fleets. Not good odds considering I had a Friday trip in two days.

So I'm scanning the dock on Thusday and see similar results. Not many fish caught. One boat brought in a bailer dolphin for their 12 hours of effort. Next boat in to the marina is an outboard flying 8 White Release Flags......WHAT THE?????? Word gets around and some guys track this boat down and the owner says he went 8 for 30 on white's and ran out of bait. Could it be the motherload? He gives us a general location of where he was. (so everyone thought)

We head NE into deep water and no outboard???? What the??? now the radio chatter is that the same outboard is North of the fleet. One boat steams up that way around noon and sees 6 whitey's in 15 minutes. Now the word is out.

Up until then, we have zero, zilch, nada in the form of bites. Oh no not again. We haul ass to the "spot" and set lines in. Boat next to us gets a double, boat to front of us gets a triple. OUr turn for a single. Next boat through the area gets covered up by 5!!! Yes, 5 on at one time. We release ours quickly and lines back out...another single. the boat with the triple, now has released all three and is hooked up with another triple. It was like this for about 2 hours.

At one point, I counted 8 boats backing down on fish, with singles, doubles, triples, and even fivesomes(?). White ones were airborne all over the friggin place.

We ended the day with 3, another boat had 13, another saw 15, most had between 3 and 9 to end the day. Needless to say it was nuts for about two hours.

The outboard boat did not make many friends this day.

All in all besides skunky day one, I had a blast. Just witnessing that amount of fish get caught was exciting. (not to mention the thought of the 1077lb blue that was caught the day before....HOLY CRAP!!!)