On board today, I had regular, Eddy from Idaho for light tackle striped bass. Eddy is a former commercial tuna fisherman and is a pleasure to have on board. I love hearing his old stories and today he brought a wonderful surprise: a stack of vintage pictures of his tuna days…! (More on this in a moment).

At first light, a lovely flat calm bay and high tide. Water temps were touching 70 degrees and there was a light south wind and overcast sky with a low pressure system. Other than the temps, things look absolutely ideal for striped bass. But we soon learned otherwise.

We began hitting my spots all around the bay in Duxbury and Plymouth waters. We did not fish Kingston today as the water temps would of been even hotter back up in the bay. We had some follows on 9″ Fin-S fished on topwater but not takes. Small fish. So we switched it up to Baymen Jigs in olive/pink/white with red gills and black heads, and that did the trick.

We moved around from spot to spot and crisscrossed the bay. I was very surprise to find most of my spots void of fish or holding only a fish or two. But we kept at it and kept moving. Later in the morning we switched over to topwater spooks and had a few more hook-ups but again I was surprised when we fished them over perfect structure under ideal conditions without a hit.

As the morning went on, we came to the conclusion that there were almost no fish inside the bay. Today turned out to be the slowest fishing day this season thus far. But did we have fun? You bet! We worked a lot of rips and structure and we caught what fish were inside the bay – all ten of them!

As I mentioned, Eddy has spent his life fishing and much of it on the bay in pursuit of giant bluefin tuna. He HAND LINED giant tuna many times (something I have always wanted to do – even for striped bass and blues), in addition to using standard tuna gear.

Eddy brought a stack of vintage pictures with him today and pulled them out at one point and handed them to me. I was amazed and very pleased to see photos from 30 years ago of his fishing adventures. I took a few snapshots of the photos to share here with you my reader and followers of The Baymen Reports.

Things like this need to be preserved and shared and I would love to see a series of books of old photographs and the stories about them. There is a romance, real and imagined, of yesteryear and our fishing heritage from the pilgrims of 1620 to the present day anglers fishing our waters.

Thanks for a great morning, Eddy, and thank you for sharing some of your fishing history and legacy. Amazing, impressive, and inspiring.

Tight Lines & Stay Posted.

Sincerely,

Capt. David Bitters, BAYMEN, baymenlife.com