Venice, LA with Relentless Sportfishing

**akman** · 02-09-2010 05:05 PM

Saturday, Feb. 6th. With our predicted weather window closing with every updated forecast; we drove south. Atlanta to Venice is no short haul for a last minute fishing trip, especially with a "questionable" forcast. But, the fishing gods owed me a couple, so with a positive outlook we drove on. Upon reaching the road south from NOLA to Venice the wind was rippin', the flags were starched. "The winds gonna lay, DAMMIT, we're goin' fishing..........maybe."

By 5am Sunday morning the wind had subsided enough to convince Capt Mike Ellis that we could make the run to the tuna grounds. We stopped on the way out to try and catch a wahoo. The hoos weren't home but we got the day started off right with some blackfins. When the blacks shut off it was time to focus our effort on the big YFT that Venice is famous for.

We started chunking and were immediately covered in kings and sharks. We burned thru hooks with reckless abandon......you had to keep a strong head to stay in the game. It seemed impossible to get a bait past the toothy frontliners. But, we managed to stay after them with Mike displaying his knot tying prowess and Blair keeping the chunks going. After 30-45 mins, the bonitas showed up and shortly after that we had our first yellow visitor swim through the slick a couple times. I pitched out a chunk and as soon as it was out of sight the line took off, put the reel in gear and instead of an immediate cut off, the rod bowed and the reel sang. 35 painfilled minutes later Mike stuck the gaff in my first yellowfin. This one was a long time coming, but worth the wait. She went 160 lbs. Right after gaffing the tuna a huge Mako circled the boat but wanted nothing to do with us.

Now is was Ridley's turn to get in on the action. We again fed hooks to the now extremely amped up shark party for another hour before we finally quit chunking to get them to leave us alone. Finally we could get a bait out away from the boat and it payed off. We caught two more blacks in short order and we were ready for one more shot at a yellow. Mike says, "this is our last bait for this drift." Just then, Ridley puts his 50W in gear and it's on again. 25 minutes later he has his first YFT at 85 lbs. Perfect way to end the day. We got lucky with the weather, it ended up being a beautiful day. We returned to Cypress Cove warn out with a box of fish and in time to watch the saints win.

Capt Mike lived up to the name Relentless on Sunday. He went all out and worked his ass off to put us on the fish. If you haven't been to Venice yet you're missin' out on an unbelievable fishery.

John