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Here's my report with pictures.
We left Fourchon Saturday around lunch for an overnighter. I had a good group of guys, and we were pretty optimistic about putting some meat in the boat. Making bait took longer than expected, but we ended up not even using it. Everybody settled into bean bags, and we cranked up the stereo and laid the hammers down. Next stop, tuna grounds.
Once we made it to our rig we set out some livies and bumped around. The cudas were killing all of our hard earned live bait, and I wasn't really marking squat. My "eye in the sky" told me there was some YFT right against the rig, but the Barracudas wouldn't cut me any slack. Knowing the YFT were there, I decided to try and chunk right up against the rig. I had my doubts it would work with all of the TEETH in the area, but we had to try something.
First drift we were able to put 2 NICE fish in the boat. The second drift ended up with another NICE fish in the boat, and one miss. Now this is where it gets interesting. We started the 3rd drift, but we were real low on bait to chunk with. We got bit off by cudas twice when the Yellows showed up. There was a MONSTER YFT in the slick that was eating every piece of meat, except the ones with the hooks. I could have touched him a few times he was so close. Then we ran out of bait! So one of those nice YFT was sacrificed, and the big fish was still under the boat. We tried small pieces, big pieces, small hooks, smaller leader, no leader, live bait, popper, and then a jig. All with no luck. I can honestly say he was way over 150, without a doubt. The fishing fizzled out after that. We tried a few things, but the bite just seemed dead. I hated to leave a spot where I knew the fish were, but I needed to keep moving.
The next rig was the jackpot. Our first drift produced 3 YFT, and the second set we caught 7! It was like an aquarium next to the boat. There was fish EVERYWHERE! Knowing we only had 2 more to catch I wanted to try something different. I rigged up my OTI 8ft 6in Tuna Sniper spinning rod with a circle hook and a piece of red meat. The fish were circling the top of the water like goldfish, and I simply dropped the chunk in the water in front of a big one and it was game on. It was like fishing with a big cane pole! I had the drag cranked to 20#'s on the Saragosa 18000, so I passed the rod to Chris to fight. He put a whipping on the fish. Tudy grabbed the Trevella jigging spinning rod and did the same thing to finish uor our 5 man limit of YFT. The last 12 of these were caught in only 2 hrs!
With the fish packed we started easing in at 2:00am. We took turns at the wheel so everyone could sleep. It was like glass Sunday morning. Perfectly calm. It was a great trip with an awesome group of buddies.
Jay
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