Flounder Everywhere!
Last week was a whirlwind of activity for me, but now I have all my fish, and I can relax, sort of. I started out by trawling for flounder on the R/V Fish Hawk for two days. We were fairly successful, and it gave me a great chance to get a closer look at some of the local fishes.
On Wednesday VIMS graduate student Mark Henderson and I went to the Eastern Shore Lab in Wachapreague to try our luck with hook-and-line fishing for flounder there since we've had little luck fishing near VIMS. The amount of fish was incredible; in one short day of fishing we caught more than 50 flounder with the help of a local charter boat. It was a huge improvement over the 15 to 20 fish we caught in two weeks of fishing near VIMS, and it was quite fun to see the eastern shore, which is a beautiful area.
Aside from a runaway tank lid and a semi-flooded Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel, the transportation of the fish back to VIMS went nice and smoothly, and the fish are safe and sound in the tanks at the VIMS seawater lab. Now that all the flounder I need are here at VIMS they're going to be tagged this weekend and I'll be watching them for two weeks to determine rates of tag loss and tag induced mortality.