Bermuda Report, April '09.

[Otoro]

Now maybe if you were to give Jim a gratuity, he might just smile for the camera.

Classic shots of Andrew showing how to fight a marlin solo!

[slip slidin]

Looks like you all have been putting the whammy on the wahoos Wound Up. Thanks for reporting from your little piece of fishing heaven in the middle of the Atlantic. Hope to have the chance to fish with you soon.

[SeaBiscuit]

Looks like you all have been putting the whammy on the wahoos Wound Up. Thanks for reporting from your little piece of fishing heaven in the middle of the Atlantic. Hope to have the chance to fish with you soon.

What he said!
Got the fish processing plant completed?
Cheers,
SeaBiscuit

[Capt Josh]

YEAH DUDE!!! Nice work amigo...been missing these updates myself!!!

Can't wait to get over there!!!!

[Wound Up James]

Josh - I'm sending a couple bottles of Goslings Black Rum over with the Mello brothers on Friday. Let Ben know it's best served AFTER breakfast and not straight out of the bottle. Enjoy it. Cheers.

[Wound Up James]

What he said!
Got the fish processing plant completed?
Cheers,
SeaBiscuit

The dock house is looking good Nick, a few minor details to work out.... Don't take my work for it though, come check it out for yourself. Bring a cooler w/ you and we'll send you and Slip home w/ it loaded.. . Looking forward to it !!

[Captain Fred Archer]

WUJ,

It's late, I'm going through one of those "events" that people with congestive heart failure are cursed with right now, so I need to try to get my mind off what is happening and try to shake the fear and pain by writing and thinking about what has been the love of my life - and you know what that is. Hope I'm not being a pain in the butt.

Roger on the downriggers. We used to call them "the gold diggers" in radio code with our buds down south back when literally no one was using them except for a small group of gringo black and blue bait fishermen. You know what they're like; we clobbered the 'hoo and all of the other pelagics, along with piles of striped marlin the many times when they were on deep squid and coming up top only to warm up and digest their meals and everybody and his stuck-in-the-one-way-rut brother was running around like madmen casting baits at them and not getting bit.

That was and still is a regular event down there and to this day there are damned few charters matching the squid hatch and sending immitations like Spiders or small jacks down to them when the dinner table has moved from upstairs to downstairs. And of course, everything else was down there at the deep dinner table, including tuna, dorado, and wahoo. Literally no one else in the charter fleet was using them back then and we didn't want anyone else cashing in on what we were doing. "Gold diggers". Get it?

A good example of what it was like was one day on a gringo buddy's charterboat - a really good one with a Mexican captain who was and still is a good friend of mine. They didn't have a charter that day and neither did we, our maintenance was caught up, so naturally, we went fishing on his boat. Until the end it was one of the longest, slowest days I ever had on the water. The downstairs squid thing had been going on for several days, the marlin were doing their "no thank you, burp" thing when they were up top, but we had been mohawking them and some deep dorado and 'hoo those days and our riggers were stacked with flags from the day before.

My gringo buddy saw those flags, heard what we had caught, and got all fired up. He didn't even ask me how we had caught the fish and I didn't say, so he bought fifty or sixty pieces of live bait. Long story short, I drove and he and his cappy and his cappy's son went through every one of those baits without getting bit! You want to talk boring and frustrating? I didn't care about not catching fish myself - by that time in my life I was much happier hunting the fish and doing my part of fighting them with the boat, etc. than I was in pulling on them myself. But to fish and get nada? No bueno!

I love the oceans, the birds, turtles, whales, porpoises and all of the wonderful things that we get to see, but that is a mere side show for me...I go fishing to CATCH FISH, and if I don't, I am one unhappy camper! So, if I am on fish, which is Rule #1, and I'm not catching them, I'm changing what I'm doing and trying something else that I know works or that conditions dictate - period!

So I pulled the surprises I had brought with me out of the backpack they were in, swore them to secrecy, and explained what a cleat planer and Spider (an early, metal version) were. The gringo guy laughed his ass off and questioned my sanity. His captain, who I knew a lot better and who knew me well, was very interested. I told him, "downriggers are usually better for me, but these work too. Let's put it out and see what happens."

You know what happened. We caught several striped marlin, some nice dorados and a wahoo in our last couple of hours out there.

I love wahoo fishing, one of the reasons being that it's way more than a one technique style of fishing and the more of those techniques that you know and the more flexible you are about changing with the conditions and the fish, the more of them you will catch. Those two days you wrote of were abundant proof of that. Too many folks think that if one boat loads up on them, "the bite is wide open", but since they don't know that all-important "how", they do lousy. And back in the day, I didn't give that "how" up...all's fair in love, war, and charter fishing as far as I was concerned. Of course, that has changed for me nowadays and I try as hard as I used to fish to teach things that will help others catch more fish.

That last part is ironic now that we have the Internet. It is a far better way than books or even magazines to find out what's going on now and to get quick answers to short questions (depending on who is doing the answering, of course.) But well written and organized books written by those who have been there and done that and who have had the blessing of learning a lot from some of the sharpest fishermen that have walked a dock cover a given style of fishing from A to Z far better and far faster than could ever be done on the Web. It amazes me how many fishermen ignore those great learning tools - and I'm not just talking my books. Amazing!

The brutal bottom line is if one gets bogged down in one way of playing the wahoo game they are limiting the hell out of their results. Fact is, I believe that they might be the most complex of all of the gamefish when it comes to the best way to catch them on a given day, or sometimes even part of a given day, then they change. Slow troll, medium speed, high speed trolling, live bait, dead bait, deep, surface, chunks ("chunks"? You betcha!), marlin lures, teasers, plugs, speed jigging...the list goes on. That makes them the most challenging and interesting fish that I fish for.

Folks who know me know that I'm not an Internet fighter and I am not an ass kisser. It breaks my heart, but due to my health, I will never get to fish with you or my Sobrino, who in some ways is like a (naughty) son to me, in spite of really wanting to because I know that regardless of all of my years chasing wahoo (over 50 years since my first one), I would learn plenty from you. Josh too. Anyway, there are no agendas here; I'm just trying to credit you for what you are - one helluva fisherman and not just for wahoo.

Yeah, baby, there's a lot more than one way to skin a wahoo!
Thanks for the good input...and them Tiger Striped FangBanger Shakes.

Be still, you old, busted heart...we gonna go look at them pictures again.

'HOO BABY!

PLEASE BEWARE OF COPYRATS USING SIMILAR NAMES TO MINE

[Capt Josh]

Josh - I'm sending a couple bottles of Goslings Black Rum over with the Mello brothers on Friday. Let Ben know it's best served AFTER breakfast and not straight out of the bottle. Enjoy it. Cheers.

ROTFL!!!! I'll try...but you know how we get!

[Capt Josh]

Fred you are always there with the info and great stories amigo. I'm taking notes as fast as i can scribble them down!!!

(chapter coming along...done soon i promise!)

[chumslicker27]

Tell you what that GOSLINGS black seal is $$$$$$...
Its like 40 proof too.... Great way to start the day!!!