August 2nd, 2008
Well It's been a while since I filed a fishing report. I think I should blame it on Nathan. He's been in bed with a hernia operation and hasn't been able to do anything on the web site. I finally got a video edited and it should post today. It's with the Keenan party. Some of the most savvy fishermen I've ever taken out. I hope you enjoy. More will follow... Last Saturday we took out the Hoover family and friends and had a great time. We started out bailing dolphin at a pot that I had found several weeks ago. When I'm in the area I stop. It's fun fishing with light tackle and relaxes everyone and gets the skunk off the boat. We worked the pot 30 minutes, put ten fish in the cooler, and headed to Washington canyon. Once we got there and put the spread out we had a nice gaffer dolphin in the boat within 15 minutes. Shelly Hoover surprised us by not going to the chair. She fought it standing up and did an excellent job. After that, it was working several areas trying to find the fish. I didn't mark any and I kept coming back to the same spot. It held bait, but we weren't getting any bites. We did see a marlin but he disappeared by the time we got there. Finally about 1:30 Justin took half the spread in and we were going to try working the pots close with lighter tackle on one side and a trolling spread on the other side. As soon as we did this a blue marlin came into the spread and started sniffing the baits. We couldn't entice him the eat and after about 5-10 minutes he left. As soon as he left a Yellow fin hit the skirted ballyhoo in front of the spreader bar. John Hoover fought the fish, doing an excellent on standup. Justin gaffed it and it was a nice yellow fin weighting 57 pounds. We found out later that that was the only yellow fin brought back that day. It goes to prove that fishing takes a little skill and a lot of being in the right place at the right time. Thanks John, Shelly and your crew for some good fishing and great company.
- Capt. Ken
July 27th, 2008
Sunday we took out the Mark Haines party looking for tuna after a not so hot bite the previous day. We decided to stay as far away from the fleet as we could, so we went south. We left at 4:30 to try and get the early bite. We passed some fish pots at sun up and decided to check them out. As we pulled up we saw a school of dolphin hanging around, so we broke out he spinning gear and began catching instead of looking. We hung around about an hour and put 10 in the boat and went looking for tuna again. There wasn't a lot of chatter on the radio, but what there was sounded the same as the day before. All very negative and nothing getting caught. We did mark tuna deep and got one or two mystery hits which broke off immediately. I had a spot in mind and finally we got there and started working it. We got a 10 lb dolphin and things were beginning to look up. After working the area thoroughly we found another set of pots and found the dolphin again. We boated another 15 or so on light tackle. Some were decent size, and all in all we had a great time. The group had a good perspective about fishing and though we didn't get our tuna, we brought back about 100 lbs of fish. We definitly had a lot of laughs, oh, and I almost forgot some great italian subs. Good job guys and thanks, hope to see you next year.
- Capt. Ken
July 25th, 2008
Well we have a fish story to tell and I promise I'm telling the truth. We fished with the Scott Buckley party this weekend. They fished with us last year and are a pretty experienced crew. We started trolling the Hambone in our usual pattern. You know, the one that works most of the time but not all of the time. Well, this time it didn't work so we had to do something else. I didn't want to get into the mele that was going on above the Hotdog. If anybody was monitoring their radio you would have thought world war three was going on out there. Screaming, cursing, threats, bad scene. So I decided what the hell, maybe it could be fun. I trolled out and there was a hundred boats cutting each other off. I made a port turn and headed more toward the teacup where nobody was fishing. Just west of the 30 fathom line the deep bait went off and kept going. The crew cleared the lines quickly and we started fight a big tuna. We didn't know how big until 45 min into the fight when we finally got the 25 ft wind on leader up to the rod tip. It was huge we could see it 20ft down and it was minimum 250 lb, probably much larger. It started to go under the boat so I had to push forward. When I reved the engine it took off again taking half the line off the reel. Every time we got it near the boat it would run. We fought it for 2 hours and 15 min before it finally tore the hook out of it's mouth. We checked the drag and it was set properly so it was no fluke. Scott and his crew worked and fought hard, and it didn't turn out the way they would have liked, but we all ended up with one hell of a fish story. The only thing I can say is it was really BIG!
- Capt. Ken