By Louis Chemi.
You don’t always need live bait to catch a mess of summer flounder.
Fred Chemi was the ultimate flounder pounder, fishing every summer weekend for as long as I remember. My dad fished with sand eels and squid in Long Island Sound. He used mummichogs and squid in the bays of Long Island, the mouth of the Rappahannock River in the Chesapeake Bay, and the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
A few years ago we fished a New Jersey fluke tournament with a friend, Thomas Zambetoglou, who educated us on more-recent fishing techniques. Dad used his traditional rigs while my son and I tried the newer techniques that our tournament friend introduced. The newer methods out-fished the traditional by a wide margin. Sorry Dad.
My father’s fluke rig was simple. It had a light-pound-test sinker loop to easily change weights as the speed of the drift and depth required. These rigs were always fished with a strip of carefully skinned and cut squid that was about 3 to 6 inches long and less than 1-inch wide. The squid chunk was fat at the top and tapered to the bottom. The bait was placed on the hook first with a single hook through the wide end, followed by a mummichog or sand eel hooked through the mouth.
Later, he learned an improved rig from a former headboat operator. Capt. Neil’s rig consisted of a simple two hook set-up. Neil preferred to fish the top hook with just a mummichog and the bottom hook with the squid and mummichog combo.
Today, with the improvements in soft plastic baits, no one needs to cut squid or trap live minnows to catch trophy fluke.
read more at sportfishingmag.com.
