Lobster report for 02/ 04 out of Long Beach- Family Trip

This past Saturday I took my brother Paul and his family out hooping for lobsters out of Long Beach. We left my boat slip at 4:30 and had all the hooping in the water before 6PM. Since it was almost a full moon I didn't know what to expect. The trips earlier in the week had all been great, 18 one night, 14 another and 12 last week. My brother never wants to go fishing so when he asked, I said sure lets go. On the boat with me was his wife Brenda and their son Josh. None of them had ever been lobster fishing and had never been out on the water in the dark.

I did my first pull just before sunset so we would have a enough daylight for them to see what we would be all night. Brenda used the gaff and pulled in the nets and my brother and I did most most of the pulling. Josh and Brenda did some of the pulling later. On our first round of pulling the net were all empty, I kind of expected that still the sun was still out. After letting them sit for 20 mins we pulled them again, this time we got two legals, next round we got three.  it was pretty good for a while and then around 8:30 they stopped walking. I see this a lot on full moons, they just seem to always stop walking early. If this had been a normal charter I would of moved around and stayed at it for a few more hours, but my nephew was done and wanted to head in. We ended the night with 10 legals and two nice size crabs. We go in so early that I was already home by the time I normally just get in. The bait was salmon heads as usually and most of the bugs were in 25-30 feet of water. I think later this week it should be great again, this was the fifth trip in two weeks were we got 10 or more lobsters. I had a great time on the water with my brother and his family, we plan to do it again before the season ends next month.