One Last Albie for the Year

This was the year where albies good and truly saved the year. The spring and fall inshore striper fishing has been spotty and the mid sized fish just aren't around. The big bluefish have been pretty much absent. And, as has been the case with the past few years, bonito have maintained their steady decline. Albies though came in right on time, chowed down like the maniacs they are and then simply refused to leave. On Tuesday the best albie bit of the year in CT or RI happened at Watch Hill. I wasn't there. Mark Alpert and I were further east, at the West Wall. We had a bite, but it was not a particularly spectacular bite. We were forced to work. 

Working and putting up with the seagull crap smell and cold wind eventually payed off for me at the very end of the wall. I hooked up on a blind class with a little grey clouser. The fish immediately charged off in the direction of a lobster pot and I feared the worst, I lost the last albie I hooked on the wall to a lobster pot back in September. I was able to turn the fish but it then decided to take me all the way around the tip of the wall and into the channel side. That long run exhausted it though and I finished the battle there. There it is, my first West Wall albie and at this point, with daytime temps falling below 40, almost certainly my last false albacore of the 2017 season.

Our bite window lasted about another 45 minutes at the wall before the fish decided they had had enough. Mark got damn close but wasn't able to hook up. We went west, hoping to fin striped bass an albies along the beautiful South County shoreline. We found some real bonafide fall blitzes. The gulls were going crazy an so were the school bass. It was a blast. If there had been a south wind things would have really popped there.

It's early November. The cold nights are here, the fall run is tapering off. It is not yet over, but the end is in sight, so any day when the fish are still around and blitzing cannot be taken for granted.