Had another opportunity to get out fishing for big tuna. I planned on taking Squatch on my boat, but my buddy said to bring him along instead. There's been good reports lately, but the weather forecasts have been a little off.
I woke up in the morning seeing a text from Steve he had an emergency and wouldn't be able to make it, but I'm glad everything was okay at the Sasquatch household.
Launched with a ton of boats at 4:20 am. Got a very lame scoop of bait again at the receivers. Bait quality was good, but these guys have been dipping really tiny scoops to the point, where yesterday might have been my last tip unless I see a quality scoop. Heading out the inlet and the wind was howling from the SW. The flad on the hotel was straight out, so we were expecting a lumpy ass day. I realized I left my phone in the truck, so the pictures would probably be subpar from my friends old old old camera. I did have my GoPro on board, but haven't used it in years, so tried taking pics with that also.
We got about 2 miles short of the 178 and we had the most incredible meter marks on the sonar. We trolled Madmacs for nada, but there was no doubt they were all tune. I tried dropping a flat fall on them and we even dropped bait down for nada, so we kept heading out. Plan was to hit the 182 and look for everything in between.
We stopped on a couple of beautiful paddies. The water was 72.8 and as clear as it can be without being purple! These are some of the most amazing conditions besides the wind at the moment. Paddies were dry and that was really weird, so we kept heading to our destination. We found another big paddy about half-way to the 182 and we saw literally 2 dodo on it, but bigger dodo. We couldn't get them to go, but my buddy finally got one to snap slow trolling a dine. Bummer that the dines are huge and it spit the hook making the second one impossible to hook and they split from the area.
We look up to see a pod of breaking fish and decided to troll the spreader bar since we have had great success with the spreader (All wins) and zero success with the Madmacs (All losses).
They were moving fast and it was tough to get on them but they looked like bigger fish. There were 2 other boats in the area, but all they were doing were running and gunning. Never saw them ever hook up as just saw them zipping back and forth sending the schools down.
All of a sudden, ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! My buddy's rod starts screaming line out! I steered the boat and got the gaffs ready to get some meat in the boat. This would have been Squatch's fish as we would have gave him the trolling rotation round 1.
75# Bluefin! Not a 2 gaffer, but a big beast none the less!
about 30 minutes later and troller #2 goes off! It sure felt way bigger than it was, but soon as we saw it to gaff, we immediately realized it was a big Yellowfin! Biggest Yellowfin I've personally seen locally and not in Mexican waters at least!
55# Yellowfin!
Now we had huge swaths of 10# YFT footballs all over the place. We weren't going to lower the bar to them, so just trolled around them looking for bigger models.
Then we trolled out of the area to just find madness. We saw a foamer and came up to it. I saw all dorado and my buddy saw tuna.... We got close to see both dodo and tuna foaming together on a ball of anchovie! I've never seen such a thing in my life! Then through the gyro binocs, all you see for as far as the horizon was foaming tuna. The sonar was filled with tuna marks and we couldn't get bit to save our lives. We threw the waxwing, surface irons, cold snipers, knife jigs, poppers... just about everything in our arsenal, for nothing. We watched tuna boil within inches of our lures just to snag that little ass chovie and avoid our offerings.
I was ready to pack it in as we had some fish to clean and I didn't want to be scrubbing and cleaning the boat and fish into the dark, but my buddy was tuna drunk on the visuals of what was around us, and we kept fishing.
I then hook up and we get our last tuna onboard. the smallest of the bunch, but still almost 40 pounds! It's funny when you can say 38# is the small one... lol
I pretty much asked him to let's get back as it was almost 5:00 and we didn't need anymore to clean or do when we got back. The entire way in we passed breaking tuna all the way up to 6 miles off LJ... It was totally amazing....
Anyway, the cleanup was tough after a full day out there, but it was not bad to get 3 decent tuna on the deck to replenish the freezer stock!
Thanks for reading and until the next trip! The wind laid down and it was a better afternoon than morning out there.
