LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
On saturday, we had Ed Trotman and family aboard for a day offshore. Ed has been doing offshore charters on the third saturday in may for 24 years. I advised him that the wind was blowing out of the southeast pretty hard and that it was gonna be a long ride to the fishing grounds, but he said "let's do it" and off we went. The seas were 6-8 foot and pretty choppy, but we made our way out and put in lines a couple miles short of our goal of the 810 and 790. Our first bite of the day was a nice gaffer on the shotgun caught in 63 degree water. Thats normally pretty cold water to be catching dolphin in but we will take it. Next was another dolphin. Then we got into the warmer water. We found a gradual break and an eddy that had spun off the gulf stream and water temps rose from 63 degrees to 70 degrees with lots of life. The water got blue and there were bait marks, slicks, picker birds, pilot whales, two toner porpoises, longlines- just lots of life. We found a tuna mark pretty much right off the bat. I circled on it a couple times and no love. About the third time I spun around on it, I stopped the boat and had Ben throw the jig. He hooked up instantly. He did not even have to jig it. We must have dropped right in the middle of them because it bit while the jig was still sinking. HUGE bite on the torium 20 jigging setup. This little setup has caught numerous 150-200 pound bluefins this spring, but had nothing for what we had hooked here. I think we may have hooked into a bigeye or perhaps a giant size bluefin. Whatever it was will never be seen. It spooled the reel before we could even get the flat lines cleared. I was expecting to drop in there and hook a yellowfin. Would have dropped some heavier gear if I would have down what was there. We rigged up some heavier jigging gear and rode around looking for the mark again, but it was gone. After that, we trolled around for a bit and found a huge area of porpoises working. We worked around them and managed a few yellowfin bites, catching two yellowfins out of three or four bites. At this time, we were a long ways from home and it was getting late. We packed it up and headed home, stopping at a wreck real quick and grabbing a couple sea bass to add to our catch. It wasnt the greatest day of offshore fishing ever, but we scrapped out a decent little catch and it was a good start to the offshore season. From the sounds of it, the Oregon Inlet fleet did better than us to the south around the 600 line, but that was a bit out of our reach.
Reply With Quote
