This weekend marked the official start of the fall albie season here in western Long Island Sound for me. The flat calm conditions this weekend allowed me to cover a lot of water. I fished Saturday morning running from Norwalk to Bridgeport with no signs of albies at all. We did however catch sea bass, porgies, sea robin, and small striped bass while waiting for signs of albies. I heard of albies being caught somewhere, but did not find them myself. There is an abundance of small bait in the harbors and near the reefs. I fished Saturday afternoon and tried a spot in deeper water and sure enough saw my first signs of albies. We did not catch any, but at least we had our first look at them. Now I knew where to go first thing in the morning on Sunday.
Sunday morning came and after getting alerts on my cell for dense fog, and looking for myself, I decided to push back our trip one hour. We left the dock at 6:30 with minimal fog. After a short run, and a gut feeling to check out some nervous water in the distance, we were on em. The fish were readily taking any color Hogy epoxy jig as long as it was presented within 5' of them feeding. If the jigs were worked on the surface it was almost guaranteed to get slammed. We saw some pretty amazing surface feeds and even had a couple of albies come clear out of the water after our jigs.
The flat calm conditions allowed us to noticed any small disturbance on the water, alerting us to possible feeds. At times there was schools of fifty to one hundred fish feeding at once all moving in one direction. We had the action to ourselves for about two hours, then slowly more boats came on the scene. When we left at 11am there were about six to seven boats within a hundred yards. We ended the day with a new boat record of albies boated: 19. We had two triple hook ups and many doubles.
