Jackassery of the First Degree

I recently found out that a fellow kayak fisherman lives only a few minutes away from me.  So naturally, I convinced him to do a midweek run down to the Tidewater area with me.  We loaded his Redfish 14 onto my car and made the hour and fifteen minute trip down.

Dan Smullen and I launched a little after 9pm and made our way out to the HRBT.  The water was like glass, which brings out the crazy power boaters.  We quickly ran into several other striper chasing yakers and shortly afterwards found a few rockfish of our own.  We also met up with Chuck Wrenn, another Richmonder.

The first few fish were very skittish but as we made our way toward the island, the we found more that weren't shy in the least.  Not too far from the island, we found a school causing a ruckus and busting on baits pretty hard.  Unfortunately, just as we were starting to get into them a boat notices our success and proceeds to run their outboard right through the school.  We held our tongues, even though we both found them guilty of jackassery in the first degree.  Of course, the fish disappeared so we ventured off to find more.

It wasn't quite as productive as I would have liked, but we did end up with a decent number of fish.  Dan caught at least ten.

I ended the night with around 15 or so with the biggest going a little over 25 inches.

We called it a night around 1am as the current started going slack.