It had looked like there might be a few hours this morning before the wind cranked up... but that didn't happen. So I watched the wind all day and it finally dropped below 10 knots in late afternoon. My older son, Brian, and I got out just after 4:30pm and first line hit the water east of TPL in 42' of water with scattered fish marks from 25' up to 10', but very little bait as we headed southwest into the dieing breeze. The outgoing current was still barely running as slack was predicted around 5:30pm. By 5:45 or so we had 10 board rods and 3 boat rods out, didn't bother with the other 4 umbrellas. Maybe that was a mistake because as we got into 28-31' of water, the marks were mostly glued to the bottom - weird for Spring - and they stayed that way for an hour as we hoped they would come up and start feeding with the sun setting and the incoming current getting going. The decent amount of bait I found on Saturday in the area was nowhere to be found today. The sun started to go down and the bite never turned on so we started eastward as we began to bring lines in. As we got to 36 - 42' of water, the marks were no longer on the bottom and we saw scattered big marks in the strike zone, but still no bait, and no fish managed to find our lures. We made our way all the way to the eastern edge of the channel by the time we got our last line in at about 8pm after sunset. The channel had no bait either, and very few marks in the strike zone... and nothing on the screen down deep for that matter either. As we pulled the boards in I noticed that the ships were still sitting sideways... current was slack while it should have been max incoming.
So I don't know what caused the skunk - lack of fish? fish not feeding during our short trip? never found the bait? or the screwed up tide change that lasted 3 hours and we never saw the incoming we had planned to fish? Probably a combination of all those things. Oh, and the solar lunar tables predicted a lousy day to fish, too.
Despite the poor fishing, it was a glorious evening on the water with a beautiful sunset and we ran home across flat glass water... who knows when the wind machine will turn off again long enough to get another fishing trip in? Glad we managed to get out and give it a try!