7-8 Feb 08/All Night Eelin @ High Rise
We decided to spend the night at the High Rise Thursday evening. With a crew of three, me, Naved (NJ), and Carl (carlt) we fished from sundown to sunrise eeling with circle hooks. I can’t say it helped but we used my swordlight and clip on lights (it sure didn’t hurt.)
We anchored instead of drifting. When that current gets moving out there, it is ripping. The zone you are looking for is where there is light from the street lights above. Just motor up and down in that zone looking for bait/fish marks. Then target that piling and set the anchor. Don’t be afraid to pull anchor and try a different spot. Drifting would be a challenge and you would be out of your zone in seconds. I fished 4 rods. Could have fished more but there was no need as we got all the action we could handle with 3 people on board. I had 2 on floats to get it closer to the bridge. The other 2 straight off the transome with 3 oz inline weights. We caught fish on all the rods. Keep the eels off the bottom as the dogs are down there.
We caught 25 striper smallest was 35 and biggest was 46. Many came in 40-42 inches. We caught fish all night long except for slack and max flood or ebb. I would estimate in a 6 hour tide window, 4 of them was good catching. We caught the most fish after talking to Brad (Shipman) who told us of the great marks and catching they had about 1/2 mile south of us. The biggest fish, for us, seemed to be closed to the high rise itself and was where we got our 3 release citations.
Nobody got much rest as it was game on most of the night. And these fish fought hard. I don’t believe in light tackle when releasing fish so we used Torium 30s and Torsa 30s so we could get them to the boat quickly and released.
At 2 am our minnow bucket we were keeping our eels in came untied and floated away. We pulled anchor and searched for it but it was gone and all we had left were 2 dead eels. Well danged these 2 dead eels didn’t keep catching fish all the way to sunrise. I was amazed at the number of big fish hanging around out there last night.
Wind starting picking up and I checked the forecast and our 5-10 knots disappeared. We tried going over to 4a for some keepers at sunrise but it was too sloppy after being up all night so we went back early.
Here is a short slide show of the evening.
Naved Hog 46 inch release citation and our biggest fish of the evening.
Carl get a hard fighting 44 1/2 inch fat release citation.
Here is my 44 inch release citation.
Thanks Naved and Carl for spending the night cranking with me. Enjoyed the evening. one of Carl’s fish, our smallest (35 inches), had a tag. At first I thought it was one of Ken Neil’s $100 reward tags but it was a regular tag. When we called it in, all they could tell us is it was a pretty old tag.
Thanks Brad (Shipman) for calling us over to a hot bite. It was still game on there after you left all the way to slack.