The Best Hraka Around
Pop The Cap, the organization attempting to amend NC’s antiquated beer laws so as to allow the sale of higher strength beers in the state, is raising money for the challenge by selling T-shirts.
When it comes time for the next brew festival, be a beer geek’s beer geek and show up in one.
You can wear it with your hat.
Why tautog are so tough to catch.
Despite their size, tautog merely nibble at your bait, thereby making them nearly impossible to detect at the end of your line. This is one of the few species of fish that can actually chew a chunk of crab from a hook and not move anything other than its jaws.
Other fish will grab a piece of bait and rip it apart with a side-to-side, head-shaking motion, thereby making a strike easily detectable. Consequently, in order to catch a tautog, you must keep the boat as still as possible and position it directly over the wreck or rocks where you are fishing.
More on how to land the tricky tautog here.
Tautogs’ dietary preferences vary considerably, but they tend to favor small crabs and blue mussels. Nedelka says he has had the most success with a combination of live crab, frozen sand fleas and frozen surf clam.
He rigs his lines with a single bottom rig armed with a 3/0 hook and weighted with a sinker of 6 to 8 ounces. For a hook, Nedelka prefers a black, short-shank hook with a slight offset, which doesn’t snag on the wreck as larger hooks do.
The Outer Banks Sentinel mentions the lesser known Southern flounder in an article on the new NC flounder limits*.
We have two major species of flounder that co-exist in Tar Heel waters–summer and southern flounder–and each have their own management strategies,” said Pate. “It is difficult to tell the two species apart, true identification can only be made by counting the gill rakers of the fish.”
Southern flounder are generally found in sounds and rivers and in the near shore ocean waters along the southern portion of the coast and is managed by the state Marine Fisheries Commission and the DMF. A fishery management plan is in the final stages of development for southern founder to help rebuild this overfished stock.
Summer Flounder: 5 or 6 gill rakers on the upper limb of the first arch and 11 to 21 on the lower limb.
Southern Flounder: Less than that. Gosh, thanks Field & Stream. Actual numbers are 2 to 3 gill rakers on the upper limb of the first arch and 8 to 11 lower gill rakers on the lower limb.
*Which devoted FDS readers already knew about. The rest of you need to pick up the pace.
Pompano, Sea Bass and Flounder look to be joining the big mouth buffalo fish as upcoming stars on the aquaculture circuit.
The Macallan, which has won four awards so far this year, is offering a chance to win five miniatures of Vintage Macallan whisky* in exchange for giving them all your personal information.
*worth ?977, or $1,776 in real money.
CtNow reviews barleywines.* Among them; Olde School, from Dogfish Head, and the Brooklyn Brewery’s Monster Ale.
*Registration required, but I suffered so you won’t have to - just like Jesus. You can log in with guest23/guest23.
CtNow reviews barleywines.* Among them; Olde School, from Dogfish Head, and the Brooklyn Brewery’s Monster Ale.
*Registration required, but I suffered so you won’t have to - just like Jesus. You can log in with guest23/guest23.
CtNow reviews barleywines.* Among them; Olde School, from Dogfish Head, and the Brooklyn Brewery’s Monster Ale.
*Registration required, but I suffered so you won’t have to - just like Jesus. You can log in with guest23/guest23.
A Walter Eager fishing report from Florida, which I would normally not note, though Walter pens a pretty fine column for a fishing report.
Except…small rod, 10 pound test, a pompano rig, and some dead shrimp. One fight later–a long one, I would imagine, a 51-inch Red Drum lay gasping on the rocks.
Plus, he confirms that mole crabs and sand fleas are the same thing, and points out the difference between a pompano and a jack crevelle, something we debated at Lookout a couple of years ago.
“Pompano have no teeth,” Perry says. “The outer mouth parts are soft, but don’t run your fingers along a jack’s mouth. You will regret the tooth marks. Also, a jack has bony scutes near the base of the tail, and pompano have a soft tail base.”
Postscript: Nice Dolphin, taken from the TCPalm pictures page.
And while we’re on the subject of Florida, here’s a list of the common species one would expect to catch in inshore waters.
The Beagle virus that hit campus almost a month ago is still going, or at least a mutated stepchild offspring of it is. I’m still getting replies in my mailbox from people who the virus has fooled into thinking the email that contains it is an official message from University of North Carolina technical staff. Here’s the latest variation
From: staff@unc.edu
To: Email removed to protect the clueless
Subject: Email account utilization warning.
Dear user of Unc.edu gateway e-mail server,
Our antivirus software has detected a large ammount of viruses outgoing from your email account, you may use our free anti-virus tool to clean up your computer software.
Further details can be obtained from attached file.
For security reasons attached file is password protected. The password is “25326″.
Kind regards,
The Unc.edu team
Let’s see. The first sentence is a run-on, “amount” is spelled wrong, “unc.edu” is never capitalized, the attached file is supposedly password protected for security reasons, yet the password itself is in the body of the email, and the entire thing appears to have been written by someone failing the definite article section in his ESL class.
People still fall for it.
Sometimes very surprising people, like IT staff at major American magazines.
there shouldn’t be anything outgoing from this email address except
for stuff that is simply forward to this timeinc.net account. if you
have any questions, let me know.
Name removed to protect the clueless
Director of Internet Technology
Time Inc. IT (x extension removed to protect the clueless)
IM: IM removed to protect the clueless
It was a day brightener for the entire office, that’s for sure.
Postscript: I cut and pasted my standard reply to those who write asking why they’ve been singled out–”We didn’t send this…A virus did, check your computer if you opened the attachment, etc.” Turns out the mail was being read on a UNIX system, so the virus never had a chance.
Not really as good of a story now, is it?