Skishing in RI 8/17/09

Last Friday night I pulled up to the night's choice of locations around 1am. The wind was light, the skies were clear, and the surf was very calm. I saw Ed and Scone as I pulled in and chatted with them a bit in the lot as I geared up. Started out with some rockhopping for an hour or so, but nothing was hitting close to the shoreline.

Ed and I made our way back to the trucks and grabbed the fins to go for a swim, pausing to chat for a few minutes with a couple other buddies who had just pulled up. We swam out about 300-400 yards and caught a tidal current which put us on a nice drift parallel to the shoreline. Not fifteen minutes later I hear a hoot from Ed about 50 feet to my left. Fish on! It was a mid 20" schoolie bass, quickly released. Not long after, we were surrounded by tail splashes and finning bass in every direction. I couldn't tell what they were on, but they didn't want anything to do with what I had in my bag. Ed picked up a couple more schoolies out of the mix before 4 seals came to check us out and spooked the school down. We had drifted close to a mile at this point and first light would be coming soon, so we finned back to shore and walked the shoreline road back to the trucks.

The guys fishing on the rocks hadn't seen any action yet, so after a short rest we got ready for another drift as the sky started to show signs of the approaching dawn.

My waterproof camera doesn't have a flash, so it's no good on night swims, but I brought it along for this drift. We swam out about 500 yards trying to pick up the current again, but the tide had slowed, and there was very little current left. No matter,,, the fish were there.

We made our first casts of this drift...

In short order Ed started getting slammed on a large needle he had made. After releasing 2 bluefish in the 10-12 pound range, he picked up another schoolie bass.

So far I was still fishless, but having a blast nonetheless. At one point I had a large bluefish swim right between my legs. After an hour or so, I saw some tail slaps on the surface about 100 yards further out from where I was, so I finned quietly in that direction and casted toward where I had seen them. Again, they didn't want anything to do with what I had to throw, until I tried a 2oz Deadly Dick. One cast with that and it was FISH ON!!! This one put up a real nice fight, pulling drag and giving me a decent tow. After a quick measure of 37", she was released to go make babies next year.

As I'm usually out there at night, and by myself, getting any photos of my adventures is tough. It was great to be accompanied by Ed on this trip and have time to fish the morning hours, which turned out yield the largest fish of the day.

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