First Blood while Sand Dab Fishing

My girlfriend and I put our first fish blood in the boat on Saturday. Remember how we had been lamenting that we hadn’t caught any fish yet? We decided to drop our crab pots and then go looking for the easiest of all saltwater fish to catch: sand dabs. Sand dabs look like flounder, but have the eyes on the other side of their body. To catch these and other bottom fish, you put a weight on the very end of the line, with two hooks just above it about 6 inches apart. You can use anything for bait, and I mean anything (when I asked, one guy told me “tacos”). We had some scented rubber worms the guy at the fishing store sold me. You let the cannonball drop to the bottom and then just jiggle it a bit. They are quite abundant.

My girlfriend dropped her line first in about 80 feet of water. She went way past that and hadn’t found the bottom yet. I told her to keep going, it’s there. I noticed that her line was near horizontal and mine was vertical. I asked to switch rods so I could figure out what was wrong. Wanting to reset, I reeled that thing in for what seemed like ten minutes. She had let out more than 300 feet of line! When at long last it came to the surface, it had not one but two good sized sand dabs on it! “Double!” she said. After that we started to get a clue, and started bringing them onto the boat one after another. Many times we dropped a line to the bottom and got a bite within 30 seconds. We learned what it feels like to hit the bottom vs. getting a bite. One came up with a big chomp taken out of it but was still alive. I suspect a seal had decided to grab a quick snack at my expense.

By the time we came back we had spent nearly four hours on the water. Our friends on land were having a heat wave, but on the sea there was a lovely cool breeze that made it very comfortable. We only got two crabs that day, but decided to leave our pots overnight for Sunday. My girlfriend took our catch home while I cleaned up the boat. By the time I got there she had steamed them all up, and fried a few of the sand dabs just for variety. Sand dabs don’t have a lot of meat compared to bigger fish, but they are actually a very nice tasting white fish. Salty old fishermen turn up their noses at them, thinking of them as bait fish or a “kiddie” fishery, but they are a lot of fun for newbies like us, and confidence building.