Sandy Point and Saving the Day

Collin and I both had a rare Friday off from school/work and we decided to talk advantage and take the yaks out. It was the first trip with my new outback and I was ready to break it in with some Striper slime. We planned to hit up the Severn river as their have been good reports of the large fish being caught in the rivers preparing to spawn. We didn't get out early as we hoped but by 10 we were approaching our exit for the Severn launch when we checked the wind and saw it was dead. After a quick conversation we decided to hit sandy point and see what a calm Chesapeake bay looked like. The last Sunday we went out there the wind was brutal and the waves beat us up and sent us home skunked. We rest our sights for sandy point state park and the deep steep channel edges where the big boats like to troll. We quickly launched and aimed for the green and red channel markers that lined the main channel.
The bay was calm and the only waves were from the boat wakes as they sped past.




 We started trolling as soon as we got out past the jetty. Looking for any marks as we passed over a couple of smaller shallow edges we had found on the navionics app. None of these features had any life until we got to a drop that went from 20 to 30 ft bait was suspended at about 10 to 15 and larger arcs were sitting below from 25 to 28. They didn't look like they were actively feeding just around the bait fish. I figured if I could put something in front of them they wouldn't refuse though. I began vertically jigging a 6 inch paddle tail on a 2oz jighead. I began pedaling parallel to the drop and there was bait and what I think were stripers all along this steep edge. At one point I had 8 large marks on my Fish finder and couldn't get a bite. We fished this edge for a good 40min drifting over pods of bait and larger fish below hoping we could wake them up but were never able to hook up. We left this spot and continued on trolling some deeper areas but we weren't marking anything and we had not  even had a bump. At this point it was 2pm and I was ready to call it so we turned back and trolled back towards the launch. While we were trolling in I remembered a trip last year (read about it here) where I caught a bunch of 12 inch schoolies and we decided we were going to try and get at least a small one to say we weren't skunked. The area ranges from 4 to 8 feet and the fish like to hide in the deeper cuts that run through the 6 foot flat. The bite still was tough up there as we trolled all the way down without a bite. We turned around to really head in and not soon after Collin had a hit and a miss then I had a hit and we were back to fishing again.we continued trolling in the same direction and Collin finally hooked up with the first fish of the day a 18 incher. Even though I didn't catch it I felt relieved that he was able to land a fish on a tough day. We continued in the same direction on this shallow flat and Collin landed 6 more from 14 to 22 inches. The day had turned for him from nothing to what seemed like nonstop action for the 30 minute stretch. I meanwhile was still looking for a bite I had on the same lure but later I found out he had a 3/4 ounce jig-head to my 1 ounce I guess that 1/4 ounce made a difference in the shallow water. He also pointed out to me how the deeper trough running though the flat was where the fish were congregated. At this point I was watching him catch fish after fish I stopped on the trough and began a cast and retrieve with my lure I prefer to fish this way over trolling and I was willing to try anything at this point to catch a fish. Surprisingly on my third or forth cast I feel my rod load up and I had a fish on as I was fighting it to the boat Collin trolled over and he hooks up just as I was landing mine. We had gone from no fish for hours to a double salvaging what had been a botched day. In the hour we were up on that flat Collin had the hot hand and caught 10 fish and one old stinky crab trap I ended up with 3. After coming home and reading some reports on the web from the day it seems everyone had a tough day finding fish we had a couple of cold fronts pass through the previous week and that was really the first stable day we had for a while I think the fishing should really pick up in the coming days and I hope to get out on Sunday to test my theory.