Saturday’s weather forecast did not bode well for our flounder fishing fortunes on this, the day of the 17th Annual Worcester County Chamber of Commerce Flounder Tournament in Ocean City, MD. First thing that morning the Weather Channel had chirped out an ominous message of small craft warnings up and down the Maryland coast later that day – not a good omen. This would be the second year in a row that our team, consisting of two of Perry County’s most avid anglers, Jeff Woleslagle and Rich Morder, paired with Yours Truly, would test our tourney luck.
Last year we had done fairly well, hitting the tournament scales with two legal, qualifying fish with the largest scoring among the top ten yet still out of the money. But this year we would be experimenting with my brand-new boat, a small fifteen-foot Boston Whaler Montauk 150 center console. The tournament trip would be just the third time I’d taken this crisp new vessel out on the water, and I was still in the process of getting to know her.
The day before the tournament I had set sail to explore the back bays and find out where the fish were biting. It didn’t take long. I found a spot in the Cape Isle of Wight Bay’s Thorofare where the same drop-off had produced 16 flounder (all throwbacks) the week before. This day multiple drifts yielded ten flounder in about two hours, one of them a legal 18-inch keeper. Convinced this was the hotspot, that’s where Saturday morning found us awaiting the 7:00 a.m. lines-in tournament opening.
And right off the bat, with Woleslagle and Morder positioned at the bow and me in the stern at the pilot’s seat, in the first fifteen minutes we collected three flounder, all throwbacks. Using my tried-and-true white and green Gulp Alive Swimming Mullets paired with live minnows on my top and bottom rig, I quickly wrestled in two of the fluke. Woleslagle, jigging his white bucktails, nabbed the third one.
But after that first flukey flurry, aside from a couple of croakers, the fishing action went ice cold. After another biteless hour or so, it was time to make a move, so we moseyed on down to the East Channel where we joined a crowded flotilla of fishermen, many of them tournament participants identified by the rather garish bright red T-shirts that were included with the $55 entry fee. Woleslagle, Morder, and I preferred to go incognito, forsaking the loud tourney shirts for more fashionable, low-key attire.
But the fish in the East Channel were not cooperating either. We endured the excessive boat traffic jostling our small boat around for an hour or so while Woleslagle scored another small fluke and I hooked up with a pair of sea robins. But while I maneuvered though the boat traffic, Woleslagle’s line caught on the outboard’s prop and the spinning propeller started peeling line off of his reel before he alerted me to the problem. I cut the engine and raised it via the trim. Armed with a pair of pliers, Morder attempted to clear the prop of the line to no avail as Woleslagle fretted about any potential damage to the brand new 60 HP Mercury engine. What else could go wrong on this inauspicious day? Plenty.
I wasn’t too worried about the outboard that seemed to be running just fine despite the tangle of Woleslagle line around the prop. But our next move would be a cruise to the Assateague Bay where we could beach the boat on Assateague Island and attend to the prop. Arriving at the Island, I pulled up onto the beach as best I could and raised the outboard as Morder hopped out into the knee-deep water and, pliers and fillet knife in hand, finally managed to remove a healthy spool of Woleslagle’s ill-fated line from around the prop.
Our next challenge would be to extract the little Whaler from the beach, a task made more difficult by the wind and waves pushing toward the shore. Thankfully, Morder’s efforts finally paid off, although he lost a Crock in the process, and we were soon back on the water and fishing again. We then spent some time drifting the outgoing tides in the same area where I had boated our best tournament flounder the year before, a fish that stretched to just over 22-inches.
But this year, no such luck, although I did catch one very small fluke as the waves and winds picked up, possibly foreshadowing the stormy small craft warnings to come. Those weather concerns prompted us to head back to the Thorofare which was much closer to home and safe harbor. On the way we stopped to make a few drifts in the crowded East Channel where Morder managed to hook up with his first flounder of the day and I picked up another pesky sea robin.
Before long the East Channel’s excessive boat traffic and gathering storm clouds persuaded us to return to the less crowded waters of the Thorofare where the day had started off so strong. As we began the first drift Morder immediately caught his second small fry flounder of the day. But unlike the East Channel with its six-mile per hour speed limit, this part of the bay had no such speed limit, giving license to thoughtless boaters and jet ski renters to race through the fleet of fishing boats at top speed, leaving smaller boats like ours rocking and rolling in their wakes.
Worse yet, as I tried to navigate the huge waves generated by these wakes, with Morder and Woleslagle weighing down the bow, the little Whaler repeatedly nosedived into the waves and wakes, sloshing cascades of water in over the bow drenching my two companions in the process, inundating the boat with a few inches of water and giving the bilge pump a real workout.
Despite the relentless deluge of wake-induced waves and the lack of fishing action, our team was determined to ride out the adverse conditions until the bitter end, namely the official tournament lines-out time of 3:00 p.m. When lines-out finally came, we had collected a total of nine undersized flounder and almost as many croakers along with a few sea robins, nothing that would compel us to report to the tourney scales this time around.
But as we headed back to my dock, it was super low tide, making it a challenge to find enough navigable water in what remained of the narrow, shoal ravaged channel. Despite my best efforts, we eventually became grounded in ankle deep water on the way back in. It was up to Morder and Woleslagle to jump overboard and push and pull the little boat through the shoals and shallows until we reached deeper water. When we did, they both jumped back in as I started up the half-tilted outboard and we burrowed our way out of the jam and back to the dock.
Meanwhile, back at the tournament scales, a 22-inch, 4.23 pound flounder caught by John Biesecker topped the leaderboard followed by a 21 5/8-inch, 2.89 pound flounder caught by John Grant that took second place and the third place fish caught by Scott Lenox that tipped the scales at 21-inches and 3.33 pounds.
Our team may not have caught any qualifying tournament flounder this time around, but it was no fluke that we experienced a very eventful, challenging, and memorable day nonetheless.
Tom Tatum is the outdoors columnist for the MediaNews Group. You can reach him at tatumt2@yahoo.com.
Source: Berkshire mont
Be First to Comment