Captain Greg and John the "Rockfish Slayer" back in action on the York River

It had been a long time since I had fished, due to buying a new place and doing a ton of light renovations (still working on it), moving (still unpacking), the wedding (we now have rings and a honeymoon planned) all while Rochelle's Dad was diagnosed with Brain Cancer - its been a hell of a year. But I did get to get out on a windy but very productive day in the skiff with the captain on Saturday June 2.We nailed the flounder off of Yorktown - 12 in about 2.5 hours first thing in the morning, but due to the new 18.5 length requirements, none were keepers (4 made last year's 18" mark) most between 16.5 and 18.33 inches. But it was a blast - the captain showed me up - he caught 10 of the 12, including the first double flounder catch either of us had ever seen ([pictured above). Mean while I had the first jumper flounder I've ever seen as it threw the hook - it cleared the water by 3 feet!

ITS THE ALLEN ISLANDS SEA MONSTER!

Naw, it was just the captain raking clams for our lunch - we took turns raking and got about 3 dozen clams in an hour or so. I had a blast raking for clams for the first time. Greg pulled a genius move and poked himself in the head with the rake. I was snoozing on deck when Greg started panicking... "Hey man - do I have a hole in my head?" I laughed and told him he needed help because noon was way too early to be that drunk, but I soon realized from his panic he was serious, and I looked and sure enough, he had a nice 1/4" round hole on top of his bald noggin. Luckily, his tetanus shot was current... We fished for trout with soft plastic jigs in the worsening wind conditions over the exposed grass beds, but I landed the only fish - a croaker.

York river clam bake on the grill - hell yeah.

Now this is what I call a shore lunch - fresh crabs from Greg's pots and a ton of York river clams.
After some chillin at the Yacht Haven Crabdeck that evening, we went out looking for top-water for striper at 10:30pm around our favorite docks and NAILED them. We caught 20+ rockfish and some snapper-sized blues. It was time for me to catch up with Greg and so I lived up to my namesake, catching at least 15 of the fish that night, in about 2 hours all on soft plastic topwater. It was incredible, I went through a whole 10 pack of 7" slug-gos! We got 4 keeper rocks and 3 blue fish, including the 20+" rock and 16.5" bluefish pictured above (yeah, we were lazy and cleaned them in the morning).

Here is our cooler - a great day of late spring fishing. I'll be in the outer banks next week, so hopefully I can do a little fishing there, depends on if I get a hold of Jason West....
Tight lines!

Boiling rockfish...

Dudes, I've only witnessed two other times fishing the docks at Amoco and this one by far was THE most active rockfish feeding frenzy I've ever seen! The rock were so thick you could have walked on their backs! I must have had 10 fish that night with the biggest being about 10". It's incredible to see these fish chase bait from the depths up and outta the water to splash:

After work rock...

Waited til' dark and headed out knowing I would catch some but NOT in such a short amount of time! Caught 2 keepers in less than 10 minutes... no shit here. Landed a total of 7 with 1 hour before peak low tide with the wind blowing against it. Kinda made the boat just sit there in front of the Amoco docks that we always catch em at. These 2 came outta the corner and the rest were caught on the side dock.