As the title states, Please stop the wind machine!!! It has been just plain awful this past week! Since I have "issues" with a lot of wind, I have not been fishing as much as usual.

 The fishing continues to be dominated by catching schoolies. Even that took a hit after two nights of very chilly temps and all but shut down the fishing on Monday. Wednesday I sucked it up and went out. I did not see any visible action on the way down river so I staid with the plan. I went 5 miles east and started chumming hard (2 chum bags) for mackerel. 10 minutes in I had a string of 4 on my sabiki rig & thought it was going to be easy! 30 minutes later I caught another..........  My thoughts are that the slow start was due to slack tide. When they started, they would come in waves and I ended up with over 100 macks, mostly tinkers with a few mediums. I probably would have filled the boat, and my freezer, if the wind was not gusting past 20! I had two 44" wide drift socks out and was still moving from .8 to 1.0 mph!!

 On the way in I did a drift out the mouth, zip. Moved into the river and I had several hits on tinkers but the fish were just to small to catch on live bait. I did troll up a few just to get the skunk off the boat & headed in for shelter from the wind.

 While we all tend to think in terms of gloom & doom, "the keepers are never going to get here"! In the past 16 years I have caught keepers by this date only 50% of the time. The latest dates were June 3, 2003 and June 4, 2000. So while I am not off to a stellar start, I think there is still plenty of room for optimism.

 I have boat maintenance this morning and then I am picking up a new bait freezer. This should keep me busy thru the last windy day of this stretch and then I will be back at it on Friday. If all goes as planned, I will be reporting the first keepers of the year for Summer Job!

Good fishing

Capt. Scott