Mackerel Evening Trip

From the end of June, Eastman’s and Al Gauron started 2-hour evening trip for fishing mack. Although it is a short time trip, evening sounds good for cool temperature, beautiful sunset and better action. I called Eastman’s first but they had only bass trip on the day. When I called Al Gauron, they had a room for a mack trip so I drove to Hampton. When I got to the pier, lots of people were waiting the boat. Seems like many people were tourists to Hampton beach and I was the only person who carried own rod.

Starfish left the dock at 6:30 with around 30 people. I brought a 6’ ultralight rod as well as Shimano Sellus so started with the UL one with a Shimano 2500 reel with 10 lb power pro. Twenty inches of 12 lb fluorocarbon leader was tied with SF knot and a 1/4 oz of mackerel jig was tied with loop knot. The boat anchored in 20 minutes or so. There were seaweeds floating near the boat so I dropped a jig in the pocket of seaweed. May be mackerel were chasing bait fish underneath. After counting down for 7 seconds and jigging once, I hooked up a fish. It seemed like a nice size so I looked for a route to pull the fish from the weed bed but could not find easily. Anyway I could not stop reeling because it would definitely increase the risk of losing fish. I gave up and tried to just pull the fish with seaweed. Fortunately the fish did not catch any seaweed on surface and I could grab leader to bring it in the boat. It was a big one, just 16’’.

Soon after that, weed bed was gone. I caught a few smaller one but felt a little nervous about using UL. So I switched to Sellus with 10 lb mono line and 1/3 oz mackerel jig. Current was strong so I casted toward bow and retrieved with short pitch jigging. The father of a family asked me if I needed fish because they didn’t want to keep fish. I replied yes and they put their catch into my cooler box. After a few times of resets, I got 3 more by the end of fishing. The boy in the family also got a good one. I kept 10 in total including three from the family. Not so bad with a big one and beautiful sunset.