I’m really not in a bad mood about it, but yeesh! I have been getting my butt kicked in the salt since June. Granted, it’s been a trip here, a trip there. Wednesday night I fished a top-secret mark with surfcaster extraordinaire Toby Lapinski. We both agreed that it looked fishy as hell: moon going behind a cloud bank for good, light winds making just the right amount of chop, falling barometer, moving tide, and….no bait. What?!? No legions of silversides? No juvenile menhaden? Toby managed a few courtesy bumps and a husky 8-10lb bluefish; all I could muster was a lightning fast double-blip hit that I suspect was a smaller blue. We only gave it 90 minutes, but we just weren’t feeling it.

Which brings us to the second part of this post. Dennis Zambrotta wrote that when he fishes the west side beaches of Block Island, he gives a mark 10 casts or so and then moves on. I don’t have any hard and fast rules like that, other than when I’m fishing by feeling, I get into a yeah or nay mindset. And on this night, the nays were screaming out loud. I was the one who formally called it, and Toby later confessed that he was ready to leave even before that. I guess when you reach a certain level, and have a certain familiarity with a mark and its patterns, you’re either feeling it or you’re not. Maybe if we stayed another hour, we’d have gotten into some fish. We did agree that if fellow surfcaster extraordinaire Jerry Audet was with us, he’d still be out there.

Jerry is a wonderful example of an angler with a plan. He knows who he is and how he wants to fish and he does it with consistently great results. You could learn a lot from a guy like Jerry — even if you never pick up a spinning rod — and a good place to start is last month’s Anglers Journal Podcast, Surfcasting With Jerry Audet. Give it a listen. Take notes. Appreciate his knowledge and passion.

Even if you’re inclined to get the hell off the reef and get to bed before 2am.