Well, after what some would call a long winter we have finally made our first fishing trip of the ’05 season. This past Saturday we officially kicked off our fishing season with an extended 18-hr. offshore wreck trip. The results were less than spectacular.

With Capt. H.D. at the helm and myself in the co-pilot seat we ventured off to fish deepwater wrecks in the depths of 30 to 50 fathoms. Yea that’s pretty deep.

Our first stop was at daybreak in the shallows of 185 ft. The Giant Sea Bass was our primary target and they were coming over the rail at blistering pace of about one every 5 or 10 minutes. Anchoring conditions although somewhat favorable left us with a slight side-to-side shear. It took anglers just one or two drops to realize that regardless of their type of gear it would take a minimum of 10 to 12 ounces of lead just to make it to the bottom.

Once you did make it to the bottom bites were frequent but most of these bites were from small sized Cunners or Bergaulls with the ever-occasional jumbo sized Sea Bass or Conger Eel mixed in. We fished over this wreck for barely an hour when the decision was made to search for greener pastures.

We rode and we rode some more. After checking out a couple of spots as deep as 300 ft. and adding nothing more to the boxes other than a bunch of Spiny Dogfish Sharks, we doubled back inshore to another big wreck that would lye in just shy of 200 ft. of water. Again we were rewarded with almost instant action from biting fish as we hit the bottom, however, again most of these bites were the nuisance bait stealers. I will say that off of this wreck we truly saw some beautiful Sea Bass that would tip the scales at 3 to 4 pounds on the average, however the numbers of fish by day’s end were much less than anticipated by everyone onboard. High hooks would end up with only a couple, or a few very nice fish, others that were not so lucky walked away with sore arms, sore legs and bad attitudes.

As one of the lucky anglers that actually caught a couple of Sea Bass I must admit it was hard to think of the trip as anything other than frustrating. Even though this sport that we love is called fishing. I stood on the pulpit and fished for almost the entire time for only 2 big Bass and a couple of handfuls of Bergaulls. One of my favorite sayings for when things get tough has always been “it could be worse, it could be raining.” This wasn’t even appropriate as the rain fell on one of our best stops of the day. This was tough fishing.

Although we did see a good number of beautiful fish on that last wreck, this trip paled in comparison to our prior trips fishing this area over the past few years. I really have no good explanation; it looked as if there were a lot more fish looming over the wrecks than we were catching. Earlier in the day Capt. H.D. had spoken with a boat that was also deep-water wreck fishing out of Rudee inlet in Virginia and he was having similar luck with the wrecks he was fishing over. While this was our first trip this year other reports have been good with fish as deep as 275 feet.

We have two more 18-hr trips on the schedule for this spring over the next two weekends. These trips will also be long-range trips and the target species will be Jumbo Bass. After that we will be running 12-hr trips every Saturday starting on March 26th. I would expect that on a few of these early 12-hr. trips, we will be targeting Tautog. As the waters warm up we will also be able to catch good numbers of Sea Bass on these trips.

One thing that we did notice on our journey was that the Ocean water temperature as far out as 25 miles off the beach was still only 39 to 40 degrees. While this is not that much out of the norm it is still very cold water and it is going to take a lot of sunshine and some warmer than usual nights to get this temperature to climb.

Our Daily schedule will start on Friday March 25th . Our target will be the Atlantic Mackerel. With any luck we should be able to see good numbers of these fish right out of the gate. The last few years have proven that Mackerel have made quite a comeback from the late nineties.

I will try to keep you up to date with any changes and continue with an honest and accurate fishing report. I am in the process of setting up a different e-mail so that it will be easier to contact me if you would like. Our new schedule is posted at fishlewes.com and for any other information you may need or to make reservations please give us a call at (302) 645-TUNA.