Shorties and Getting Bit by a Skate

One foggy dog day morning, Noah and I drifted around an Eastern CT bay, bottom fishing. It was a short fluke filled day, we caught them with consistency. Though most wouldn't be particularly thrilled, I don't fish for fluke often and that's the only way to get big ones in today's fishery. I'm just happy to catch any flat fish, because they're wicked cool animals.

Most of the time I was fishing with a strip of sea robin on my jigs, But I did make sure I fished without it enough to get a couple properly on the fly. I don't catch flatfish on the fly nearly as much as I'd like to.
Towards the end of one drift, as we started to come up into shallower water, I got some fluke like taps then set into a fairly heavy fish that bent my 5wt to the cork. It didn't feel at all fluke like. It was either a ray or a skate. Given that we'd been wade fishing the same flat the previous evening and had seen and fouled a bunch of clearnose skates, more than I'd seen my entire fishing career prior, I had a feeling it was one of those. And that's exactly what it was.

We netted it. This proved to be an ill advised move.

The skate bit down on the net and decided it didn't feel like letting go. I decided to flick in on the snout just above its mouth to try to get it to let go. I'd forgotten how protractile a skate's mouth is....

Before I'd realized what was occurring, I found my finger very firmly in the jaws of an unhappy and impressively strong skate. I gasped in utter shock at how strong this fish's jaws were. And how much my finger now hurt. I could not simply pull my finger out of the skate's mouth. I asked Noah for help... and to take a photo. The photo was prioritized over my finger... documentation and story telling over my own safety is the name of the game.

Photo courtesy Noah Johnson

I was convinced that if the fish decided to start thrashing I would at best have severe lacerations and at worst lose my finger. The latter seems pretty unlikely, but at the time I really felt like that was a possibility. It f****** hurt! Noah and I, using pliers, managed to open the mouth and remove my now damaged middle finger.

I don't recommend getting bit by a skate. It isn't fun. If you, for any reason, need to get a skate to let go of something, don't flick it about it's mouth, just grab the pliers.
Until next time,

Fish for the love of fish.

Fish for the love of places fish live.

Fish for you.

And stay safe and healthy.

Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, John, Elizabeth, Brandon, Christopher, Shawn, Mike, Sara, Leo, and Franky for supporting this blog on Patreon. 

The Shark Mission, Pt. 1

I'm a very indiscriminate angler. I'll fish for anything in any water with any gear. I'm perfectly happy catching two inch gambusia in a ditch, and I'm just as happy pulling on a fish almost as big as me.
It's impossible though not to be captivated by catching a fish as big or bigger than oneself, and well, if given the option between catching a 150lb something and a 150mm something, I'll probably choose the latter. There are exceptions. But, especially recently, I've had the insatiable urge to pull on something that could potentially kill me under the wrong circumstances. Something, big, gnarly, and a little bit scary. Noah has been on the same page, and two boat-less southern New England goons really have only one option: sharks and rays from the beach.
There's one really big issue with that. There is very little local information that would point us in the right direction without doing a little bit of driving or possibly hopping on a ferry. The Cape and the Vineyard are the known beach sharking places in New England. But we wanted to do something closer than that. We were both certainly willing to leave CT, but we didn't want to go that far. Our first attempt at sharks actually was on Cape Cod, and for all intents and purposes we learned very little from that other than that spider crabs are annoying and there were plenty of tiny dogfish in the wash at a certain beach at a certain time. We'd talked about sharking in Florida but never did, we had so many species to catch in daylight and couldn't just skip a night's sleep with the amount of driving we did each day. Our knowledge? Slim. We'd both seen small brown sharks in one specific area, I'd also caught two in 2012 or 2013... I can't remember which. But other than that we were lost. We put some of the pieces together from what guys have been doing on the Cape, but we couldn't seem to get out of our misguided ideas of what shark habitat is. Our first mission was an abject failure in every regard. We came exceptionally unprepared and left without anything. We really didn't learn, and that is what qualifies a failure to me. Not skunking.

We talked about going sharking again for weeks, and not only didn't go but managed to keep missing the obvious. We were way off, obviously of, so obviously that we'd not even once considered trying where we'd seen sharks every year for the last few years! I'm still baffled at how we were so off the mark. It took me running into a random snowbird local at a spot I've fished for a long time to for me to get my head out of my butt. One quick chat with someone who clearly had never been targeting sharks and the pieces started to come together. Two nights later Noah and I were out on the sandbar after sunset, ready to start catching cartilaginous fish. Neither of us were expecting to get a brown shark or sand tiger here on this night, we just wanted to put something on the beach. Neither of us had caught a large dogfish. Any skate or ray would also be appreciated. We waded out to into the breaking surf and sent a high-low rig baited with squid as far as possible, then walked back onto a dry part of the bar and set up.

It wasn't long for the first hit, and not much longer before Noah was pulling on something substantial. It was a dogfish, more precisely a dusky smooth hound. The fight was not bad. The fish did the typical thing once in shallow water and tangled the crap out of everything. But we were both immediately struck by the same though: Why, other than that tangling nonsense, are these fish so hated? Contrary to popular belief they aren't inedible either. In fact I have it on good authority that the are quite good eating with no more preparation than it takes many other popular species. And on light tackle from the beach? That's a good pull! We were fairly pleased with our little shark. It wasn't a toothy one, it wasn't going to be biting anyone's hand off while unhooking, but it was a shark.

Mustelus canis

It was now my turn on the rod. Thing is, I'm impatient. I couldn't sit and watch that rod tip waiting for it to bend... I wanted to walk around. With a headlamp on a perused the shallows, seeing tons of Atlantic silversides, banded and striped killifish, and some northern kingfish. Noah shouted that there'd been a take and I ran over. The rod was no longer pulsating but I picked it up, reeled down, and struck when I felt pressure. My fish was no shark, not even a bland toothless one, and that was immediately obvious. It ended up being a clearnose skate. Not a giant (Noah would actually hold the world record if he'd known what he had a couple years back), but a fair sized one, about the size of the first one I caught on the fly. Funny, this was my first skate not on the fly.

Raja eglanteria

Though we had a handful more definite takes that night, no more fish came to hand... er, no more fish came to hand that weren't caught by hand. Killifish are pretty easy to hand catch with a spotlight at night. We caught some HUGE striped killifish that I regret not photographing. Lightning loomed in the background and we soon left. I caught on 20 something inch striper on the fly before we left. That had to be done.

Funny as it may seem a dogfish and a skate had lifted our spirits a lot. We were much more confident all of a sudden. Noah and I had a pretty clear path now. We are going to do this thing... we're going to get a big shark on the beach. It's not a matter of if, it's when. 

As we were out there, Hurricane Dorian was aiming for the Bahamas. Being a meteorology nerd I'd been watching the storm closely and it had become clear it was going to be one for the books. With all the power of an F5 tornado but 40 miles across, Dorian slammed the Bahamas. The damage it has done is indescribable. As such, I feel it is necessary to forgo my typical post ending. There are a whole bunch of people that need our help, and simply sending "thoughts and prayers" through a social media post ain't going to cut it. If you can, please give financial aid. A good place to start is the fundraiser for Abaco Lodge (www.gofundme.com). There are other good relief efforts going on as well and they aren't hard to find. Flooding and tornadoes associated with Dorian have also effected the Carolinas, and though the damage done to the Bahamas far overshadows that we shouldn't be ignoring anybody who's lives have been turned upside-down by one of the most devastating and powerful hurricanes in history. Please do your part. I understand if you aren't in a position too, it hurts that I can't do more than I'm presently able to. 

 Thank you to my Patrons; Erin, David, john, Elizabeth, and Christopher, for keeping this blog going.

A New Old Hunt

There were fisheries here in New England not all that long ago that have practically been forgotten. Well up there is winter surf fishing. Hardly anybody is out there doing it anymore. I can understand why, it is brutal out there from mid November till March, and there aren't many fish left. The giant pollock fishery that used to exist at Montauk is almost non-existent. The surf cod fishery is pretty bleak. Tomcod are no longer the staple they used to be. Winter flounder are in decline. Of course, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Years of commercial and recreational abuse did these fisheries in. Climate change has been no help either. Some of the Old Guard will recall tails of 30lb Pollock in November, night fishing for cod on Rhode Island and Massachusetts beaches, and catching copious amounts of tomcod in the bays of Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. But the last few generations of anglers have little knowledge of these things. The number of angler days in the surf between NYC and Bar Harbor from December till the end of February is undoubtedly minute. But there are some fish out there. So, today, Noah and I embarked on the start of a quest to catch something new from the clear, cold inshore waters of southern New England in late winter. This will be a tedious quest. The chance is there that we catch nothing at all. We are starting from basically no knowledge. I have no doubt that we will learn a lot in this quest, and hopefully it will lead us to one or two or maybe even more new species.

Noah almost became a Florida resident this winter. It's a funny thing. Within a week he has gone from fishing for spanish mackerel in 80 degree weather to targeting tomcod and skates in 35 to 43 degree weather. That's contrast.

Today we were basically scouting. We've got a tiny remaining window for the tommycod before they leave the inshore waters of the sound, so that was our initial focus. The first spot was dead, excepting weird orange jellyfish we had never seen before. In the second spot I actually got one definite fish take. What it was I will never know for sure. Perhaps I should add, we were both bait fishing. I fully intend to target these species with the fly, but coming from such an uninformed position, I needed to collect as much data as possible before attempting to catch these species in probably the hardest way possible. Squid was our bait today. Clams and worms will likely be employed as well in the near future. Without any confirmation of the presence of tomcod, we switched gears and went to an area where I thought skate might be possible, though we'd still be in possible tomcod habitat. We set rods out on the jetty and watched from the van to stay out of the wind. We had no signs of interest in our bait at all, but the cove was far from lifeless. There were hundreds of gulls and water fowl of a few different species.

The fourth and final spot we fished was a place I had seen a skate two winters ago, and Noah and I both seen a number of strange fish we couldn't identify there in the winter. Alas, in contrast to many of the times I have fished there, it was dead. Tired of fighting the rocks and loosing gear, we called it a day. This is just the beginning. Noah and I will be haunting the surf zones in CT and RI for the rest of the year, and the next 40 days hold promise for some of the more unusual fish of the year. We just have to put our time in, especially since we're starting late in the season. It's something anglers did a lot up until about 30 years ago. It's not a new pursuit. But it is for Noah and I.

If you enjoy what I'm doing here, please share and comment. It is increasingly difficult to maintain this blog under dwindling readership. What best keeps me going so is knowing that I am engaging people and getting them interested in different aspects of fly fishing, the natural world, and art. Follow, like on Facebook, share wherever, comment wherever. Also, consider supporting me on Patreon (link at the top of the bar to the right of your screen, on web version). Every little bit is appreciated! 

Summer Saltwater Alternatives

Bluefish are not the staple they had been not long ago in the summer. There are plenty of schoolie bass in the Sound but they can be inconsistent in the warm water. There are big bass on the reefs, that of course isn't an option available to everybody. Bonito have all but vanished in the last six year, maybe more, especially in the western Sound. But there are, indeed, alternatives for summer saltwater fly fishing. One just has to be willing to think outside the box, and be willing to fish for a few of the species that many don't consider worth targeting.

Yesterday Noah and I went hunting for some of these fish. It was cloudy, muggy, and almost dead calm. I wasn't ruling out the potential for big stripers, or bluefish, as the area we were fishing has a tendency to hold them both even when other close-by locales don't. Schoolies and small cocktail blues were virtually assured.

We started out by cruising the very outside edge of a big flat. The fish I was expecting to encounter there is also one of my favorite alternative summer targets: sea robins. Outside of sight casting on the flats, they aren't particularly fun for an experienced angler. But they really don't deserve their reputation, nor to be called ugly.
I think they are adorable. But most who encounter sea robins don't do so on the flats. Having them follow me around like puppies, and take clousers presented literally on my foot very quickly got them a place in my heart.


Yeah, they are easy to fool, but any sight fishing opportunity presented should be taken as it provides some of the most significant insights into fish behavior, and no matter how daft you target is there is no better alternative than practicing dropping a fly the correct distance and angle in front of  a living fish. This evening was odd. I saw numerous sea robins roll at the surface and bust on silversides but on the initial pass of the flat I didn't see even one in the water. I did, however, catch a bass.

The next move was to work a rip where massive amounts of silversides and bay anchovies congregate, as well as typical Northeast species like blues, albies, and bonito. Odd fish show up there too though, and that is our reason for fishing it. Spanish mackerel, jacks, ladyfish, triggerfish... nothing is really a surprise there. Today oddballs were lacking. So were bluefish, but they were around. A handful of bergalls, a scup, and a blue... now I was building a species list. The bergall photographed was from a different outing, but fits the size of the three I got today. When you're hoping for a banded rudderfish photographing a cunner is not a priority. Porgies are virtually everywhere in the Sound, and they are a really good alternative target for fly rodders in the summer. Fishing porgies on the fly often means long light leaders and heavy, heavy flies. I often circumnavigate the system and use either a fly tied on a jig or a drop shot rig. If I can chuck and duck it with a fly rod without risking snapping it, I will use it for porgies and black seabass. Don't get stuck in convention, this method is no less fly fishing than Euro-nymphing methods.

Next, we fished a can and a rockpile. Small fish often congregate on cans, and they can be a hotbed of odd species. Unfortunately the one we visited today was not a producer, but it could be in as little as a week or two.

 So. Back to the flat it was. Sight fishing with clouds and a very low sun is not easy, but fish like sea robins will hold position until you are almost on top of them before they spook so much they won't take a fly or jig, so we still had some advantage. That there was a lot of surface play was also t our advantage, we could see where fish were working from far off. Sea robins don't always give you that option.






Neither do skates. But when one is very brightly colored and lets you roll right up over it's noggin, unless you are paying no attention to the things you should be you are probably going to see it. When I spotted an orange and pink diamond shape with spots plastered on the sand I knew exactly what I was seeing and new I wanted to catch that sucker. I knew staying in the kayak which was drifting quickly down flat as not a good option, so I ditched it. I followed the fish, dropping my clouser in its path, and eventually got it to take. While I hooked the fish and started the fight Noah wrangled my kayak. I then retrieved it and walked both the skate and my kayak up onto the sand bar for a quick photo shoot.

That was the highlight of the day for me. Skates on the fly are not common. This is my second, same species as the first: clearnose skate, Raja eglanteria. 

It was followed by a brief burst of sea robin activity, in which both Noah and myself hooked and landed one, then a lull as darkness fell. My last fish of the day was another bass, Noah's was a near legal fluke. Our species count was exceptional.