Outer Banks Rockfish

[Capt. Ray]

Striper fishing over the past few weeks has been good to great. Most days its no problem to catch a limit, but there has been a few that it took most of the day to do it. The biggest problem this year is the fish are 30-40 miles from the inlet, so it make s it hard to find fish on a half day trip. Next year, I will be running full day Striper trips only, unless they move closer to the inlet. Most fish have been in the 20-30 pound range with a few in the 30-40's. all fish this week were caught casting lures, which is more fun than trolling. I’m hoping that some bigger fish will show up in the next 2-3 weeks. This week, I”ve taking the guys from In-Fisherman magazine out for some Striper action. Tuesday, we caught all our fish casting and jigging different lures. Wednesday, we had a blow day and Thursday we were back at it. We started out casting and were doing well, but they wanted to do a trolling segment, so out came the gear. I trolled four lines, two with single lures and one with a spreader, the other with a double bucktail. The first pass thru the school, we caught six fish on four poles. No bad except for the chinese fire drill of three people and four poles with fish. After that fiasco, the trolling gear was stowed away and back to casting we went. The fishing action was pretty non-stop all day. They got plenty of shots catching Stripers. Thanks to Doug Stange, Dr.Ed, and Dave the cameraman for two great days of fishing and Dave for his some-what funny jokes. Its just fun fishing with light tackle out of a small boat rather than trolling heavy tackle with big rods. There are plenty of small inshore charter captains that love to fish that way, including me. Who knows, maybe they’ll make me famous. HA-HA-ha, I doubt it. I still have a few openings left, so give me a call.

Tight lines, Ray