ADVENTURE OF FISHING By: Jim
Flash back to the summer of 2021. We’re 30 miles east of ocean city, bailing for mahi-mahi around patches of sea bass trap floats. It’s an adventure on nearly every fishing trip; you never know what will bite your hook, how big it will be, or what will happen next. We’ve been surprised by surfacing sea turtles, porpoises playing in our wake, and feisty almaco jack mixed in with the mahi. But we’ve done this type of fishing many times before. It’s an adventure, but it falls short of adventure fishing status. Then one of the guys aboard, fish talk contributor eric packard gets a funny grin and says, “you know, it would be really exciting to catch these fish from a kayak.”
Indeed.
Almost exactly one (awful, horrible, very bad, no good) year later, there’s an ideal weather window. The mahi is within shooting distance. And we are all itching for some adventure in our lives.
Eric and fishtalk production manager Zach Ditmars have experienced yak anglers, and I’m not, so I leave all the details relating to the kayak to them. With a fleet of five to choose from, they decide on Zach’s old town top water pdl because it has a pedal drive for hands-free fish-fighting but should be relatively easy to launch and retrieve from our 22 glacier bay “mothership” since it’s compact at 10’6” and weighs under 100 pounds.
Saturday afternoon arrives. I prep the big boat, Zach preps the old town, Eric prepares the food and drinks, and we all attempt to sleep early even though we know it will be a fitful night of tossing and turning. It always is when you’ll be getting up at zero-dark-early to embark upon an adventure fishing trip.
Mercifully, our drive to the boat ramp is completely uneventful. We splash the boat, load the kayak into it, and pull off the dock to try an experimental launch and retrieve in the sheltered waters. Satisfied it’s doable, we strap the kayak down and idle towards the inlet. Zach wins a coin toss on the way to see who will get the first turn in the yak. As we pass beyond the inlet rocks, we go through another experience that all die-hard anglers are familiar with: your first look to assess just how wrong the marine weather forecast has been.
We gaze out over the horizon. We look east, we look south, we look north, and we are amazed. We then looked at each other in shock — the weatherman was right. The waves are one to two feet within 12 seconds; the ocean is essentially glass.
Twenty-some miles later, I pull back the throttles. There are a dozen bass trap floats off the port bow, but we have a problem because there are also two dozen boats trolling around them. Word must have gotten out about this bite. Dang, those weekly fishtalk fishing reports!
Whether we can catch fish here or not, we decide it’s too risky to launch the kayak with this many boats milling around and opt to keep running. At 34 miles, we find a field of floats with just a pair of ships working. We pull up to the first float; toss some chunks, and then baits. No takers. We try another. And another. We hook into a few loners, and Mahi and Zach pull in a nice 10-pounder, but we don’t find the school we’re looking for. We begin running again.
Mid-morning, we stop heading east and turn south. At noon we make a depressing turn to the west. Every pot we’ve hit has zero to one fish, and the school we’re searching for remains elusive. We’ve had fun and boated a few Mahi, but our adventure is turning into little more than a slow day of normal fishing. Fewer words are now being spoken. Laughs become harder to produce. We discuss the flounder bite and begin to wonder aloud if we should drift the great eastern reef on the way home and at least try to pick up a few flounder for a change of pace.