They call me Mr. Squidward

On Sunday June 1, a college friend of mine and I headed out and tried the same game plan as the last time. Get on the water before sun up, try our luck at getting some live mackerel, and then see if we could parlay them into a keeper striper or two.

We headed to the same spot where I caught the 4 mackerel the week before and we really tore them up this time. Within about 90 minutes we had over 50 mackerel. We were like a couple of kids fishing, it was just too fun to stop.

My buddy also caught a squid that morning. I've heard that you can catch squid on a rod and reel but I've never seen it done. We kept it most of the day and tried cutting it up into strips for bait but didn't have any luck with it. Next time maybe we'll try using Mr. Crab or Sponge Bob.

After we filled up the bait well with mackerel, we headed north to Plymouth Bay and the Gurnet to try live lining some of the mackerel we had caught. We were chatting with the guy from Riptide charters before we left the dock that morning and that's where he said he was headed.

Unfortunately for us, no stripers were to be had. There were 20+ other boats in the area and nobody was catching anything.

Lessons Learned:
You can put 5 mackerel in the bait well, and they'll stay alive for most of the day. If you put 50 macks in there, they all die in about 15 minutes. We were lucky enough to catch 3 more up in Plymouth, but we still didn't have any luck using them.

Mackerel tend to hit the sabiki rig on the drop. You jig up, let the rig flutter back down, and most of the hits happen then.

Smoked mackerel isn't half bad. I'll have to report back on how pickled mackerel tastes in another week or so.