Winter fishing has been mild for weather, which is great for anglers. It is also great for other outdoor winter activities. Stargazing is best in winter because the skies are much clearer, especially for astrophotography. If you thought haze was bad in landscape pictures, try shooting the stars.

This week and into next week, we can see the green comet really well. The comet’s name is C/2022 E3 (Z.T.F.), much less exciting than the Neanderthal comet as it has been dubbed, due to its last time in our neighborhood. It hasn’t been in our solar system for 50,000 years. Look near Polaris, the north star. The only issue is you won’t see a green comet with a tail. The tail is barely visible to the naked eye and the comet will be a white dot. Photographs make them look more exciting, big and fast.

Soon, hopefully it can be seen by the naked eye almost as well as we could see Neowise. Cloudy nights make it difficult to get enough sky time for astrophotography. Shooting a comet is not easy. They move really fast, and the earth is spinning really fast. The tracking gear has to be dead on to get good images to stack. It takes hours at times for enough images to get a good stacked photo. Hunter Outten did a great job for his first attempt at a comet. He has been doing really well with nebulas, too.

Aside from stargazing in the chilly night temperatures, beach combing has been rewarding for many of the regular beach combers. Wintertime is great for beach combing. Less competition and daily rearranging of treasures helps. The exercise is a bonus as well. Fresh salty air is good for the soul.

White perch is still the preferred catch. There are still some migratory striped bass around. I was out catching grass shrimp the other day at a boat ramp. I scrape the bulkheads where the green grass is growing. If it is low tide, scrape the bottom along the bulkhead. It takes longer but you get enough shrimp to fish for the day.

I found a full-grown bunker that swam up onto the banks of the Indian River. It was covered in sea lice, indicating it came from the ocean. Once it was breathing less heavy, I pushed it back in and it skedaddled along the marsh banks. Something pushed that fish to the riverbank — maybe a seal or maybe a predatory fish, or it was trying to scrape off all the sea lice. It is exciting at times to see indicators of other life around. It gets your blood going thinking some big striped bass are in the area.

If you haven’t already for the 10th time, check your gear for the spring. Hooks need to be replaced on some lures. Split ring pliers and some new rings and hooks are a must. Maybe think about changing out your treble hooks for single hooks on lures. Especially if you catch and release, a treble is a hassle to deal with and chaos to the fish. If you have some old plugs with worn-out hooks, that fish will hit. Take off the hooks and hold onto the plug. If you are into catch and release, this is a lot of fun with bluefish schools.

Throw out a plug with zero hooks, ultralight gear for a bonus. See how many fish you can get to hammer that plug and hold on till you get it back to shore. It is fun to see who gets the most “hook ups.” It’s no harm to the fish and a lot of fun. My best is eight. I try to beat it every summer with those schools of small blues. The big gators are not a lot of fun to deal with hammering a hookless plug, at some point it is not coming back. The little guys tend to not cut the line as much. Choose your school of fish wisely. This is a lot of fun at the Indian River Inlet, too, and avoids the snags in the rocks. Hookless plugs tend to come home all the time. It also works on schooling striped bass but with lower numbers — I am up to three.

Check your line. There is a new kid on the block for braid line: True Braid. If you are ready for new line, I recommend giving it a try. I like my braid for my lure set-ups and mono for my bait rods for summer fish. There’s no reason to destroy braided line catching kingfish and spot for tacos. Putting that line on a 13-foot old-school Lamiglass from the 70s with a Penn greenie reel is just a bonus for fun. I certainly get some looks when the coffee grinder sound cranks up on the retrieve.

Short striped bass action is around all year long. You just have to look for fish around structure and fish winter techniques. Slow retrieving a rattle trap will wake up a fish. Many times the fish are along the bottom of the waterways and you need to work a soft plastic on a jighead, slowly.

The surf is skates and dogfish, you can also find short striped bass around structure. Fishing the town storm drains and exposed jetties is good this time of year and no one is around. Make sure you have your fishing license on you. I still haven’t bought my tags or licenses yet this year. Busy winter so far, hardly time to fish.
For those that were asking about the Beach Coalition, for a decade they have tried any way they could to get near “private” beaches in front of their houses along Fenwick Island State Park. They don’t want vehicles parked out there in front of their houses. If not allowing vehicles parked there, it would become a private beach since no one is walking two miles from the bathhouse parking lot public access to use the beach. They have been paying a lobbyist thousands of dollars for years to wear on Dover to give them just that. Now that they were put on that committee to help as a “stakeholder,” they pushed for the reservation system, on the premise that limiting vehicle access is limiting access to the public and isn’t a popular idea. In reality for them, if you have vehicle limits, you still have X amount of trucks on a beach. If you have X amount of reservations and these aren’t used, there are empty “spaces” on the beach, or less vehicles than the reserve limit. You following me so far?

So, if you have a reservation system, now you and your homeowner friends can all get surf tags. Buy two tags per household, and make reservations for every tag. Then don’t use the reservations. Now the beach is mostly clear. I guarantee there will have to be a limit for numbers of reservations. I mean, you can’t have reserved spaces and have unlimited spaces, what is the point then of reservations? See how that doesn’t work?

Fifty bucks says they push for all-week reservations after they congratulate everyone on how well this worked. It won’t work well at all, but that is the hope in their minds, I guarantee it.

So there it is, in a nutshell, what I meant last week. The surf tag reservation system can be gamed and it was known in the beginning by the people who pushed for it, so they can get what they want.

Announcement from the Tidal Finfish Advisory Council:
The State of Delaware Tidal Finfish Advisory Council provides non-binding guidance to DNREC Division of Fish and Wildlife on issues of tidal fisheries management. The TFFAC is comprised of one recreational and commercial representative from each county (six total) … We meet on at least a quarterly basis in Dover and/or through a hybrid format in recent years.

The longtime Kent County Recreational Representative Jay Little stepped down at our last meeting in 2022 and we are seeking applicants for his slot. The Governor’s Office POC is Grace Kelley (Grace.Kelley@delaware.gov). The application is located online at governor.delaware.gov/boards-commissions.