After a while, the realities of two people fishing from a twelve-foot boat caused me to start looking around for something less cramped. It was my wife who found our next vessel in the storage yard of our car dealer. Covered in grime and with a hole in the hull as big as a basketball it was a bargain at $250 bucks. It also happened to be a Boston Whaler! And with some extensive fiberglass work and a coat of red marine paint, we had the “Red Baron”. A used trailer and a vintage 10 horsepower Johnson outboard completed the package. Years later our son sold the “Baron” for $1500 dollars. Those whalers really have a great reputation. Although only thirteen feet, this boat provided a stable platform and allowed us to really explore both Oyster Bay and Cold Spring harbor.
This time, there was no dragging the boat across the sand. We would enter the unmanned parking lot about four a.m. and launch from one of the four well-maintained ramps and park in a designated trailer area that could accommodate about fifty boats. A very nice facility, it was no wonder that they charged non-residents, thirty dollars to launch. I have a sneaking suspicion that they were trying to discourage non-townies! Of course since there was no one on the gate until 8.a.m. and we were on the way home by 7:55, it was never a problem.
Our routine was fairly standard, slowly motor around the moored sailboats in Oyster Bay until we found bunker flipping, snag ten or so and move to deep water where we would chunk. On occasion however, the blues would be on the bunker, and we would snag bait and let it swim and quickly have a teen blue fish eat it. In those cases when our bait was chopped in half, we would quickly reel in, discard the head, snag another bait and resume livelining. In retrospect, I'm certain we were missing a great opportunity to take some nice bass which in all probability, were under those bunker schools, picking up leftovers. Interestingly enough, we never picked up bass when we chunked deep water, of course if you have been following these reports you know that once I lock on to a productive system, I rarely change the approach. In the case of the deep water chunking, I found a sixty-foot hole in an otherwise thirty-foot stretch of bottom, and by guiding on a navigation buoy, was able to return to the same spot each trip, so much for being consistent! Subsequently, we discovered that the bass under the bluefish theory was quite accurate, but that's another story!
