The old saying, "time flies when you’re having fun", can be somewhat of an understatement at times. I really find it hard to believe that it is actually the first week of December. It truly seems as though we were just talking about catching Mackerel, but here we are with Christmas just around the corner and another month is now behind us.

Weather has given us an incredible break over the past few weeks with mostly fair winds and calm seas. Fishing has been a pleasure on almost every trip that I have run over the past week, and the catching has been pretty decent too! I have continued to fish over wrecks for Sea Bass and Tautog and I have actually been out fishing on nine out of the last eleven days. At one time fishing this many trips would be unheard of for this time of the year, but nowadays seems as no big deal.

Our Sea Bass season for 2004 has come to an end with the Federal closure. The Sea Bass will reopen for hook and liners after the first of the year. We did continue to catch good numbers of Bass right up until the end, with some near limit catches on Friday and some lucky anglers landing 15 or 20 again on Saturday while catching dozens of throwbacks. Sundays trip I opted to fish for Tautog up in the Delaware Bay due to hard southerly winds, a light crowd and a downright bad forecast. Not only was the forecast way off, the Tog must not have known we were coming, because we kicked their butts. Just about everyone on the boat walked away with a limit of fish up to 9 lbs.

Our last 12hr. wreck trip of the year sailed this past Saturday with Capt. H.D. at the helm. H.D. took the "no guts no glory" route looking for the big Sea Bass and the end results were not good. I have not spoken to H.D. since this trip (he may still be hiding) but I know what he tried to do and it just didn’t work this time. There would be no "Glory" on this offshore adventure. The Sea Bass won this round.

Striper fishing in the mouth of the Bay continues to be very good although some trips are better than others. This is much more typical of Striper fishing than the heavy action that was seen just a couple of weeks ago. A lot of smaller fish are now starting to show up providing good action on Jigs at times for those willing to cast and retrieve. Live bait is still proving to be the best choice for the biggest fish, and there have still been a lot of citation sized fish landed. We will continue with our Striper fishing daily at 8:00 am until the 20th of December with the headboat.

As far as bottom fishing goes I will continue to fish over Wrecks on Friday, Saturday, Sunday’s, and Monday’s until the 20th of December. We will be fishing exclusively for Tautog or as some call them Blackfish. There seems to be a very good number of these fish around right now providing us good angling opportunities to catch these cunning bottom dwellers over the next few weekends. The State of Delaware currently has one of the most liberal size and creel restrictions along the mid-Atlantic coast. We are currently allowed 10 Tog at14 inches and above. This makes for a nice bag of fillets when all said and done.

If you would like more information on any trips sailing out of the Wharf please give us a call at (302) 645-TUNA or check out our website.