Brian and Joe Connely and their buddies Rod and Joe jumped on board the Free Spirit with me and Capt. Bob Cope, yesterday at noon and we set off for the edge. The inlet was, to say the least, very interesting, but the boat ran right through it quite easily. I was not sure just where to go but I figured that, with the water I saw on the satellite shots, they could be anywhere. From what I heard offshore, they were everywhere. We ran off and decided that we would start to fish as soon as we found 74 degree water. It was 69 or so for most of the trip but we did find some nice weed filled water and decided to start to fish about 3 miles inshore of the edge. We set up and pushed off to the edge on the troll. As soon as we cleared the 50, the weed thinned and the bait was all over the screen. Still, no takers, so off we trolled and with the best sign I have sen in a while, we had our first hit. We boated a 65# YFT, and all the baits were out of the water as I looked at my E 120 and saw fish 60 feet down. I shouted back, "get some baits in the water!" and we slid 2 back. As soon as I hit the trolling speed, another YFT of the same size jumped on. YES! We caught a couple of dolphin and then set up for the chunk. Conditions were perfect with a .5 kt drift to the south that slid us right down the edge from 60- 90 fathoms. We had not been drifting more than 20 minutes when the first fish hit a sardine 60 feet down.

As we set out the lines, we were only able to get 2 in the water before we were smacked again. What a shame! Wayne and the rest of the men were quick learners and they soon had fish on the top lines just feeding out unweighted sardines. We were mobbed with squid and we caught 1 and set him out live, Why, I am not sure since we were basically roping the tunas on sardines,but what the heck. He disappeared under suspicious circumstances but it didn't matter since we were still on fire with the other baits. Heck we even missed one on a butterfish. We had about a 15 minute lull, and then I saw fish 100 feet down on the E 120, dropped a bailt down and GOTIMON! That seemed to draw the fish up and we finished our charter's limits of 50-75 lb fish by 9:30 P.M.. It was so busy that we did not get a chance to try a couple of things like fishing hi-viz line and jigging( I tried but got 2 sweeps in before the bait rods went off) and most important, we had no time to fire up the grill and do some tube steaks. Ah well, the concessions we have to make... It was also impossible to clean the fish or the boat for a while, but I guess that was O.K.

As Capt Bob says, " There is nothing better than killing stuff and getting a boat bloody"
We also had an 8" tiger shark swim up to the boat but he did not affect the fishing. After i collared the fish we realised that we had nowhere else to put fish and decided to quit. We cleaned up a bit, and started home around 10:00 P.M. 13 knots home so we could take enough time to get to the inlet with the tide incoming. It worked and at the dock I spent over an hour cleaning tuna whil;e Capt. Bob gave the boat a bath.
Her's a pic of a happy though tired crew.

It just doesn't get any better than the fishing we had.