Flounder fishing picks up — just a little

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been lucky enough to smell a salt mud marsh on a fresh summer’s day, but this here Chanel No. 5 I read about can’t smell near as good as just plain channel with the wind blowing off the marshes, fetching the smell of mud with a little bit of cedars and cypress that line a sound mixed up in the sun and grass and plain old mud full of sandfidder holes, oyster beds, and rotting clams. I never thought too much about a marsh, but it’s really the richest piece of real estate in the world.” — Robert Ruark, "The Old Man and The Boy."

First let’s start off with the good news. Flounder fishing down along the Old Grounds (the shipping approach to the Delaware Bay) has gotten better over the past week. Decent drifting conditions and perhaps a few more fish have led to a better week.

“In some ways it’s been our best week on them,” said Capt. Rick Yakimowicz aboard the all day headboat out of Fisherman’s Wharf in Lewes.  “We have had more limit catches spread around the boat than all year, and good numbers of short action. Let’s hope it keeps going.”

Let’s hope so indeed. Because that flounder action, meager perhaps compared to what it has been over the last couple years, is really the only hope boat bottom bouncers have.

Up in Shark Bay (Delaware Bay), all anglers really have to hope for, save a small smattering of flounder on a reef site and the now occasional triggerfish, are their one paltry legal trout and, well, after that better hope the drinks are cold!

“Only thing up here are trout and teeth, and we can’t keep either one,” said an angler at the Mispillion boat ramp last week. “Just don’t pay you to go anymore.”

Hard to argue with him, or others that look at the results of however-many years of increased regulations on fisheries have yielded not more stability, but ghost towns. 

Sure, offshore anglers have done well with tuna, and tilefishing has been good.  Even with that there is a cautionary tale to be told, as too few, it seems, remember when only the Skipjack as fishing for them. 

Now, it seems, everything that floats fishes for them and the writing will be on the wall for them as well too.

Croakers are scarce all up and down the coast, and commercial fisherman haven’t had a good year on spot in quite some time now. In tidal tributaries, where more and more anglers are making a stand because, well, you can still keep white perch, the fishing has also been much tougher, albeit nowhere near the horror show that the open Shark Bay has become.

The kingfish that, incredibly, seem to be the mainstay of fishing effort around here are providing some action to surfcasters up and down the coast. Old Inlet reports that casting just over the breakers with small hooks, baited with either real or artificial bloodworms, can get you into the kingfish game.  They are scrappy fish and delicious on the table.

With a little, well, LOTTA’ luck things will hopefully be better next week. 

Perhaps the flounder bite will continue to improve, or the weather will get better offshore and the tuna boats can get out with more regularity. Or maybe, somewhere, someone will let us have more than a measly trout to keep. Brave new world that would be! 

Good luck and good fishing.

Reports, comments or questions to captjackrodgers@comcast.net