Road Trip: Kayak Fishing Classic at Jamaica Bay part 1

Loaded up and ready for Jamaica Bay

I have started to cross the destinations off my list (read here) that I made at the beginning of the year. When  I first put this tournament on the list I wasn't sure if I would be able to go but now I cant wait for next year.The format of this tournament is different than anything I had done before It consists of four days of fishing. Starting with prefishing on Thursday and Friday morning then at noon on Friday the tournament fishing begins and runs until noon sunday. Collin and I missed prefishing Thursday but arrived at 2 am friday morning. We slept in the truck until 5am when we hit the water to learn as much as we could before the tournament started at 12 oclock.

Our quick prefishing trip started off great as we headed to a menhaden hot spot to snag some bait they were right where the internet said they would be. We quickly snagged a few and were off to

explore with our live bait in tow. It didn't take Collin very long to get the first strike of the day on his but unfortunately the bluefish severed the bait behind the hook. This missed stroke did help us though as it alerted us to the location of some feeding fish. I quickly started to pitch the Cotton Cordell Red Fin
 fan casting to catch the active fish. I quickly had a couple hits on the redfin but they quickly came unbuttoned. I was finally able to get a 25 inch blue to the kayak after a few more casts. While I was handling that fish Collin was getting all he could handle on his cut bunker before he hooked up with a personal best 28 incher.

Collin with a nice Jamaica bay bluefish.

 I landed two more blue fish on the jerk bait really quickly. I had another bite but this one was fighting a little differently than the blues as it got  closer I could see through the clear water that it was a striper. The bite Friday morning surprised by how good it was and I was hoping the remaining two and a half days would be just as good. Soon after I landed the striper we had a bluefish double. After the double we decided to call it a morning and head in for lunch and to prepare for the captains meeting that preceded the beginning of the tournament.

I always catch a good fish when I call the trip prefishing.

When we headed in to the captains meeting I chatted with a few guys who all had the similar results of plenty of blues and very few if any stripers. The tournament started at 12 and right on cue there was a noticeable increase in the wind. Collin and I launched and headed back to the area we were previously catching fish. By this time it was almost low tide and the flat we were fishing had dropped from 6 to 2 feet. We backed off looking for some nearby deeper water I began to troll a tube and worm on the channel edges. I quickly received a strike but didn't hook up but we continued to work the dropoff as we were both marking good size fish on our fish finder . The tide turned around and began to rise and the bite picked up. We stopped trolling and began to jig on the marks and received some strikes.  Collin was able to land a small blue while I just ended up with a jig that was missing a tail. soon after the wind really picked up and we started to move back  to the launch.

Read part 2 Here