[Ed D]

Phil and I finally got out Sunday for the first time in several weeks due to schedule and weather issues. My nephew joined us as we left Back River around 645am. Water at the dock was very high and the tide chart said it was low time. With the preponderence of strong W and NW lately, that was hard to figure...

We headed out and south towards Baltimore Light. As we passed the mouth of the Patapsco, we briefly considered heading in there but decided to stay the course. As we arrived at Snake Reef, we saw multiple flocks of gulls working over the area from Snake Reef all the way down to the Light along the channel edge.

We set out a 5-rod spread of tandem small bucktails and spoons and trolled around the schools for about 2 hours picking up plenty of dinks but nothing bigger than 15".

Funny thing about the birds, and this continued ALL DAY...we saw almost NO surface activity under them...no splashes, no breaking fish, no jumping bait. The birds would swope down and go after something but, despite pretty clean water, we couldn't identify what they were going after. One of the dinks we caught did spit up a 3-4" peanut bunker, but we saw no flashes in the water under the birds...

Left the dinks in search of bigger fish and trolled over to the LP buoy...nada. No birds, no marks and MUCH rougher conditions.

Decided to pull up everything and head into the Patapsco where it sounded like the fishing was excellent...

On the way there, we came upon more birds on Belvidere. At one time we could clearly see maybe 8-10 small flocks. We put out 4 rods and started to troll between them and finally took our first keeper...19"...on a 1oz Spro bucktail in bunker with a 4" white twister tail deep in 20' of water. A few dinks were added and we worked our way to a new flock...

This time something bigger hit a #14 tony in chrome about 250' back with 1 oz on it....after a long, tough fight, my nephew landed a big butterball 25-26".

We worked our way to another flock and had another good strike on a #15 tony in chrome... it was 22-23" (sorry for the estimates, the cooler was only 20" across).

Around this point the tide had slacked and the wind was picking up again, so we headed back toward HMI where we managed a final 19" on a #14 tony in chrome again...

Finally headed back to the barn.

The birds litterally stayed in the same areas and didn't move around like they were keeping up with schools of fish busting bait. I thought for a while that maybe a commercial guy had changed the baits on his crab traps and that's what was going on, but we saw birds and caught fish in areas where there were no traps around for quite a distance.

The couple of times we took to trolling through them (basically had the area to ourselves) nothing showed on the meter and we saw nothing in the water.

Still, no doubting the birds led us to fish and for that, we're grateful, though it did seem like the birds were pulling that old Bugs Bunny routine where he keeps telling Elmer Fudd that the rabbit he's looking for is here, there and everywhere, "he's in there, he's in there" as the sucked us from one flock to another.

When I cleaned the fish, I found absolutely no discernable baitfish in them...nothing.

That just adds to the mystery...were these fish chasing bait and did they just happen to be there?