Connecticut JUMBO Seabass and Porgies

[Reel Class]

Yesterday, 8/25 my college buddies chartered a "NS" 6 pack boat out of Mystic, CT for a half-day bottom fishing trip for our buddy Scott's bachelor party.

I drove up yesterday morning and hit little traffic and got to Mystic in a bout 4 hours.

We left the slip and headed out into the Eastern Sound/Ocean past Fisher's Island to "The Race" and tried drifting and bouncing 12-16 oz. diamond jigs in about 200' of water on rock bottom for bluefish in a 3 knot drift - LOL - didn't work.

So our captain moved the boat about 5 miles to the east to a rock reef which was about 4 miles right off Montauk. Up there, they drift for seabass and porgies, using hi-lo rigs or fluke rigs baited with squid or cut smelt - NO CLAMS! Up there Charters can keep 8 seabass at 15" and porgies have to be 9" just like here. I was skeptical of the approach, but in the first drift we boxed up a few nice seabass and a few jumbo porgies. We did this for awhile until the tide slowed, picking away at short seabass, some real JUMBOS, plenty of porgies and one nice 24" 4.5# fluke by my buddy Jack.

When that slowed we headed back to the Race, the drift was better, only like 1.5 and we tried jigging the blues again with no success, but the bottom rigs were sent back down and we caught some real JUMBO offshore size seabass in the 18-22" range and lots of keeper porgies topped by our biggest at 16". We also boxed up 4 nice bluefish in the 5-8# range on the hi-lo rigs.

Ended the day with about 30 porgies and 2 dozen keeper seabass. I'm pretty sure 20 out of those 24 were over 17". This was a great trip with great friends and for once I was able to fish and not worry about running the boat