We focused the mornings from 6am-8am on casting lures around the islands hoping to get a few large striped bass or blues, but that just did not happen. The biggest striped bass we got was about 21-22" and the biggest bluefish we got were 17-18". We spent the majority of the day focused on chasing down albies and targeting bluefish by finding bunker schools and throwing plugs around them in hopes of eliciting a strike.
Albies: The albies were thick around the islands, but we never saw more than a few fish pop up at the same time. Mainly just 1-5 fish would feed at once. We still managed to connect with a few by casting Hogy Epoxy jigs and soft plastics. We continued searching East and then across to LI. We were rewarded on LI with a flurry of action, including the only bonito landed of the tournament. It seemed that there was a school of bonito mixed in with the albies. We just happen to get lucky.
Striped Bass: We focused on casting lures around the islands with very little success.
Bluefish: We focused on casting big lures into bunker schools. We probably hit 10-1 bunker schools this weekend with only 2 bunker schools having blues under them. Of those two schools, we dropped a few that attacked our lures and some just followed our lure but did not commit.
The conditions were perfect on Saturday. Sunday the wind kicked up and put the albies down apparently. They were no where to be seen on the CT side and only a few popped up on the LI side.
