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Babes on Baffin and Blue - This was fun!
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By:
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JDooms
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Mood:
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SALTWATER FISHING
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Date:
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10/22/2007 12:27:53
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Music:
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None
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I recently had the pleasure of fishing the Babes on Baffin and Blue tournament a few weeks ago. It was a lot of fun and I highly recommend this event to all of the women out there. They have 4 different divisions that you can get into:
- Non-Guided Any Bait
- Non-Guided Lure Only
- Guided Any Bait
- Guided Lure Only
You get your score by adding up the total inches in length of your biggest Trout, Redfish, and Flounder. Your fish are also weighed, which they will only use to break a tie. Individual awards were given for the largest Redfish, Trout, and Flounder as well as the Overall Team Awards.
When my team got together that morning, I told them that I had been on a few schools of Redfish and that we were going to go straight to them and then work on the trout and flounder later in the day. We were faced with heavier winds than we had had for a few weeks and some monster high tides. We rolled out heading for Dead Man's and Kate's Hole just north of the JFK Causeway and looking for the schools, but with the heavy winds and extreme high tides, it may it very difficult to find them. We fished for a few hours and found nothing.
We moved to the south to another spot in the north end of Night Hawk Bay and set up with Maulers rigged with Blurps and Gulps. I had them set up for making long drifts and fishing these lures like shrimp and popping corks. Immediate success was found, but all of the fish we were catching were under sized.
We moved further south towards Pure Oil Channel where we found birds working and slicks popping up everywhere. We set up just as we had done in Night Hawk. We ended up catching a ton of small trout, nice sized Redfish, and MONSTER Skip Jacks. We got our trout and our Redfish that we needed, but we just could not buy a flounder. I told my girls that we needed to concede to the Trout and Reds and go in search of a flounder.
I stopped off just south of the JFK Causeway in Sulpher Flats. I've caught quite a few flounder off of the channels that run along side of the flat and the ICW. As I was coming into my spot I noticed that the tide was falling out pretty hard and another spot came to mind immediately.... Packer Channel. The north end and the east side of the bridge has a small sand flat with 2 very distinct drop offs. With the tide falling out, it would put all of the fish on the East side, catching bait as it gets washed around with the tide. With the sand there it would make for a great spot for flounder to ambush all of the bait coming down the channel.
We used the trolling motor to troll around the back side and then eased up and sat the power pole down. We took off the maulers and rigged up to go to the bottom with just jig heads. We fished for nearly 45 minutes and no bites at all. I had just made the call to go and try something else when one of the girls, Sissy, gets a bite, we see that it is a flounder and we get it in the boat. The problem was that this flounder was too small, 12" was not going to work. Not 5 minutes later she hooks up again, this time the fish is peeling drag like no bodies business. She's asking me what I think it is. My answer was, "It could be anything out here, but if it is a flounder, it's gonna be big!" Low and behold it was a saddle blanket for sure. We get the fish in the boat, 22½" long and just over 5 lbs. WOW! What a flounder. My recommendation was then to stop this and go in search of a larger trout. We fished for another hour and a half in search of any trout that could help us cull out the 16" flounder in the live well. We never got to upgrade, but we did have more action and my girls were able to watch some large sea turtles as they swam alongside the boat during our long drift.
When we got to the weigh in we discovered that only 1 other team had a flounder. They had a larger trout than we did and I was worried that we would get a 2nd place finish. Well, turns out they are in the Guided Any Bait division. We are going to win hands down now. We have a 22" flounder + 3 live fish in the live well, that gets you a 1" per fish bonus for a total 3" bonus for our team. We were supposed to be in group #4, Guided Lure Only. We found out right before the awards ceremony that something got a miss and we were set in #3, Guided Any Bait. How that happened we didn't know, but it would look bad if they switched us and we won. So, we ended up in 2nd place, not bad at all. My hats off to those girls. They fished hard all day long, battling wind, back lashes, lots and lots of sun, my crazy stories, and a ton of small fish caught. They really were a lot of fun and I'd love to have them again next year.
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