About Ready to End It

Donald and I hit it yesterday, Christmas Eve morning, and though I caught 100% more fish than Donald, that was only because I caught one fish.  We gave it a good attempt, fished all of first light and covered a lot of sand, and definitely determined it was 'exhaling'.  One sure sign of that was the 'bird blitz' we found.  Ducks were pushing up sand eels which brought the gulls, and gannets were diving on their own while terns were picking up whatever the sand eels were chasing (never trust terns!).  The only ones missing from the party were the stripers.

From there we decided to just plug some holes with mambos on the falling tide- our favorite kind of fishing.  We looked for likely spots and there weren't many.  Since the weather has been trending calm a lot the structure had settled out since storms are needed to sustain contour.  We did manage to find a stretch of beach with better water, so we worked that, skipping from spot to spot with about 7 casts each.  It didn't take long before a nice 28 incher slammed my yellow mambo, and I got juiced up thinking it was the start of something.  6 more spots and 3 miles of beach later with nothing else we decided it was time to leave.

Since we haven't really had even marginally powerful storms since last year (even including Hurricane Irene), the beach has taken on a look of artificial replenishment and is devoid of structure that holds fish.  As the spell of calm weather continues, long-time locals report never having seen our local beaches in this condition.

Since Donald is off for the holiday week, he may want to get a ride from me again, and that is the only thing that will make me go back.  I usually love fishing this time of year, but with only limited areas of good structure, and the ones we fished had nothing in them, I'm kind of turned off.  So I will make my official declaration this week dependant on what Donald wants to do.  I am ready for it to be out of my head so I can get to focusing my laser on other things anyway.