Good Weather, Good Fishing, Good Friends, 11/6/11

[Rivercat09]

Good Fall Weather Fishing, November 6th, 2011

The plan today, weather permitting, was to go to the eastern side and jig drop-offs near oyster bars as well as shallow water structure. Today, the weather was spectacular, and we did just that. With me today were Norm and Ron; I was in a bit of a funk, but Ron had the hot hand today. We had a trolling spread and some bottom fishing gear with us as backup plans, but we stayed with plan A. With our ramp still under construction, we splashed the boat today at about 9:30 am Eastern Standard Time at Holiday Hill Marina on the Rhode River. This morning, we moved the clocks back an hour and gained an hour of sleep.

We started out on the western shore, and the skunk was sent packing relatively early, when Ron put a 21 3/8 incher in the cooler at about 9:55 am. We headed to the eastern side at a little after 10 am, and found some dinks working under sporadic bird activity in the general vicinity of Poplar.

We left the dinks at about 11 am, and found some more keepers a short distance away in shallow water near some structure. Within one minute’s time, I tied into something relatively large but lost it after one run on the rattletrap, Ron hooked and landed a 21½ keeper on his Gotcha, and a fat 22½ football smashed Norm’s 6-inch pink and green Bass Assassin with ½ oz head. With three keepers in the box, we took a lunch break at Knapp’s Narrows at about 12:30 pm. Norm and Ron each caught a 21+ inch keeper in the afternoon. With five keepers iced down, we headed back to the Rhode, and pulled the boat at about 5:25 pm.

Conditions
Low tide at Poplar was at 6:33 am, high tide was at 12:38 pm, the following low tide was at 7:13 pm, and the moon was 79% visible. Salinity at Annapolis was fluctuating between 5.0 and 5.5 PSU, and has been more or less stable over the past 20 days. The skies started out a little overcast, but cleared off by noon. The air temperatures were in the mid 40’s in the morning and rose to the mid 50’s by late afternoon; the water temperature was 52º. The winds were light and variable. They started out of the east at 6 to 8 knots, laid down for a while in the early afternoon and then shifted to out of the south at 4 to 7 knots in the afternoon.

Jigs, Plugs, and Other Offerings
We threw the usual medley of offerings ranging from 6” BKD’s and BKD style jigs in a variety of colors with ½ oz to ¾ oz heads, silver Gotchas, bronze rattletraps, 4½” chartreuse Storm Chug Bugs, as well as various and sundry floating, sinking & suspended lipped & lipless stick baits. The hot baits today were the bronze rattletraps and the silver Gotchas.