Sore and Hungry- 3/31/07 VB BFT report

[Carson Mac]

Left OC at 4.45 headed right behind the Cigar looking for that 70 degree water. Got a ride with Barry(twoxFour) on his GW 27' Sailfish. Connor(C-Note) and Marty(Fish Wagon) rounded out the crew. 75 miles later we dropped lines just below the 000 in about 200 fathoms. Found a nice temp break of a .5 a degree upto 67 and bam, long is screaming. Fight em till we see color, just get the wind on crimp through and he makes one last run. Crimp catches a loop guide and he is gone. Throw the lines back out. About ten minutes later, two on. mine comes unglued and all the pressure is on Connor to find out what these fish are. Get em up to the boat and its a 44" BFT. Nice fight, glad we got some pullage, but let's get some meat. Put lines back out and triple on. All 44-45", so back they go. Figured we needed to head further south so we headed away from are mark and bam, another one hits the deep secret bait. %&$%$&^. Draw straws and Barry is up. Another schollie. trolled south all the way down to the 850 and couldn't find any warmer water. It actually got colder. Figuring something was better then nothing so we head back to our mark and caught two doubles and two singles, one on the wind-on planer, (damn I love that rig). Just missed a keeper by 1", and man was he fat. Pulled lines at 2.15 and we were back at the dock by 5. Nice day, small seas, fun crew, and pullage made for a fun saturday. By the way, the bft hit mostly baits fished real far from the boat.

Final tally
9 for 12 44-46" BFT

Cmac

[JOE_DIRT]

Glad to see you got some action. Anything is better than sitting at work<

[johnseafood]

For some reason the BFT always hit further away from the boat it seems like. Although we do catch them on the flats as well. Man only one more in. and it would of been a keeper. Congrats to you and your crew

[bar rod]

Congrats on the fun day!
Quick question for you...what are the bluefin tuna regs right now? I'm going to try to fish out of OI this weekend and want to make sure I know what we can keep before we get out there. We're mostly used to catching yellowfins, so I don't know the BFT regs.
Thanks!
Ed

[Caveman Sportfishing]

I believe this is the current regulations at this time. We fished a few weeks ago and got covered up with 45 inch bluefins and you could have caught them all day but none over 47 inches. I think there have been some bigger fish caught out of Hatteras recently. We marked much bigger tuna down about 200 feet but they will not come up for trolling spread and if we would have had time we would have stopped and dropped down a jig or rigged bait for them. (Some of our group had to catch a late afternoon flight out of Norfolk) This is pretty much what we see up off Cape May during the early season is the bigger fish are deep feeding on the bottom while the smaller ones are up in the warmer water.