Offshore VEnice LA

[CaptEddie]

The wahoo bite continues to be solid out of venice and the size remains impressive. I had J.W. and his friends in on thursday and friday. we headed out in some nice seas and had an extremely slow start. It seemed like everything I tried just plain did not work. We finally caught a blackfin trolling and then around 130 we ran into a school of yf and caught a 70 or so pounder on a popper. We could see the wahoo jumping as well so we knew it was about to turn on and turn on it did. Using a orange/yellow stretch we slaughtered the wahoo. In the space of one hour we put 11 wahoo in the box including one triple header At one point we couldnt actually get back to the oil rig before we would be hooked up. It was one of the most insane wahoo bites I have ever seen.



We went out the next day and this time they never did show up. We put one wahoo in the boat and a yf. We also broke off a 150 plus yf on a popper at the boat.



The fish wanted virtually nothing to do with pink as we caught 10 out of 11 fish on orange and only one on pink.

[Capt Josh]

Damn bro...SLAYIN EM!!!

Weird about the color preference one day over another...I always hear you talk about the stretch's...i've never tried them for wahoo around here, i'm guessing that's your #1 over there though eh?

What's the size, speed, etc that you find works the best? I'm going to try targeting more wahoo around here in the next week and want to give those a shot...hook a bruddah up! Your wahoo shots are killing me, bacon-wrapped teriyaki skinny on the brain!

[gottaflylee]

Way to get them Capt. Eddie. What size stretch do you pull?

[CaptEddie]

the stretch 30 works the best and I pull them around 8-9 mph. They work best pulling on bent butts. I rig them with single strand 140 pound wire. A big key is to change the hooks to 5/0 owner treble hooks

[Tenacious]

Hey Eddie,

There you go again showing all the other captains up! Great catch wind was pumping Sat and Sun, stayed inside and caught a limit of reds.

Steve

[Logan9581]

the stretch 30 works the best and I pull them around 8-9 mph. They work best pulling on bent butts. I rig them with single strand 140 pound wire. A big key is to change the hooks to 5/0 owner treble hooks

We had issues with the split rings bending when we are grouper trolling with them.

[Ron Mexico]

Damn bro...SLAYIN EM!!!

Weird about the color preference one day over another...I always hear you talk about the stretch's...i've never tried them for wahoo around here, i'm guessing that's your #1 over there though eh?

What's the size, speed, etc that you find works the best? I'm going to try targeting more wahoo around here in the next week and want to give those a shot...hook a bruddah up! Your wahoo shots are killing me, bacon-wrapped teriyaki skinny on the brain!

JT,

Keep your leader short say about a foot to ft 1/2 and change out the stock hooks for the stronger 4x triple hooks this way you won't straiten out to many. Braided line works better to get the bait down deep( top shoot it with a little bit of mono or flor) as does the bent butts like Eddie said. Once we hook a fish usually back off the drag to keep from pulling the hooks. As for my favorite color pink, silver/ blue, purple, orange, rainbow, chartreuse, white body/red head.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Wow! Great hooin', Capt Eddie! You obviously know your way around the FangBangers!

I don't fish plugs much anymore, but when I did I rigged them with the same short wire as you do. Single strand, no cable. My topshot was very different. It was what we call a "Dacron Hammer". It's the reverse of a conventional topshot, with the Dacron on top. Just a little more Dacron than the longest amount of line we'd have out on a given plug or other lure cat's pawed onto the mono running line. We would put on a bit more Dacron on than we would have out on a given outfit - all of which were numbered so they kept going back into the same holes. Like you, all bents. Eighty pound string, but the rod blanks were 6 1/2' or 7' thirties, the reason being that the rod had no use as far as the bent butt hook sets were concerned and the longer, more flexible (IGFA style, not stand up) blanks had good flex and absorbed the wahoo head shakes well without pulling hooks.

The reason for the Hammers was to enhance hook sets on hard mouthed 'hoo. For me, at least, they were a vast improvement over stretchy mono. With all mono or conventional topshots we had too many wahoo crunch down on plugs, sink their teeth into them (easy to see on the plugs), pull off line, then spit out the plug and we'd either miss them or sometimes just snag them and too many snaggers pulled off for my taste.

The Stretches weren't around when I did my wahoo fishing and I found the Rapala's too hard to keep tuned, so we used mostly Marauders and Boone Cairns Swimmers (great plugs, by-the-way) and we modified them with the heavy split rings and here is the big difference, replaced the trebles and double hooks with singles that weighed the same, so the were big'uns. We bent the wire hangers and fished the belly hook down and the tail hook up. Between that and the Hammers, we rarely missed or lost a wahoo and that was a vast improvement over what went before.

You obviously have a lot more wahoo than we did down in Cabo, but we had good numbers of them compared to most places and there were a lot of truly huge, hard-to-hook fish. There's a shot of one that was IGFA illegal that weighed 220# in one of my books caught in Puerto Vallarta. Might be on the website too. That sounds huge, but bear in mind that the latest all-tackle record fish, 183#, came from Cabo recently. What that boils down to is, every fish that we missed or lost used to blow my mind because I always had my heart set on catching the record 'hoo.

We did a lot of other different stuff as far as tackle, rigging, lures and techniques were concerned.

Here's a terrible picture of a Marauder being rigged with singles. When a wahoo runs into one of these on a Hammer, the hooks go home, deep and fast and they stay in!

Hope you don't mind the comments. Just passing along some similar and maybe some not-so-similar tricks used by another Wahoo-Head. And thanks for being so open with yours.

Website www.FredArchersWorldofFishing.com

[fishchef]

Capt Josh not to step on the Capt's thread. But here in the North East, I and My customers (when I had my tackle shop) have had very good luck with the dolphin patterns. Splatter was the best and caught the biggest one 90+lbs. That fish was caught as they went through a school of chickie dolphins, took the boat out of gear and as the strech started to float up it got crushed. Most of the hoo fishin up here is high speed cover as much area as possible and structure. Or we pulled them on the outskirts of weedlines.
Capt Eddie great job,