With an 8:30 PM low tide at Falmouth Heights I expected pond outflow to continue till about 9:30 last evening. With little moon I expected a good evening for eeling and plugging the ponds mouths.
Starting at dusk I dropped my eel bucket at my pond mouth; and worked my way down my beach, and on and off a couple jetties, plugging the coves and jetties with a humongeous 9" swimming plug. I had hopes of intersecting a big fish somewhere along the way.
Alas, while I hooked up with a couple 20-24" stripers, the cow never came.
At full dark I went back to the pond mouth and started eeling. While the tide was going out; the pond had little flow and the action was sporadic.
I hooked a couple low 20" bass and a couple 7-8 pound bluefish, but never got into any really big fish. I had a couple good hits and cutoffs from what had to have been decent sized bluefish, but when I finally bit the bullet, put on the wire leader and drifted a couple cutoff eels out the pond mouth, I depressed myself.
I felt the eel cigar get picked up, waited a good long while (Siwash hook, not circle here) and really, really *set* the hook. To my dismay I skied in a 16" pitiful schoolie; gut hooked and bleeding. Unhooking it was out of the question, cutting the wire leader was no better, and despite my best efforts the fish went off, sideways, no doubt to soon go belly up.
That put a damper on the evening, and after getting cut off one more time by bluefish I decided to plug instead.
What I had forgotten was that plugging after dark with big lures and bluefish is a fearful experience. While my lures were either single trble (tail) or double single hooks, 8 pound bluefish in the dark with extra hooks flying around is terrifying.
I got 2 or 3 decent bluefish this way; the tide slacked about 9 and I called it a night.
L.