As of Thursday, the marine weather was supposed to be 2-3 at long intervals and light winds....
By Saturday morning, it switched to 15-20knot NW winds, 3-4' wind waves, 3-4' swells at 5 seconds and a long period south swell. Temp break showed the clean water was past 22 miles out and it was pretty dirty inside of that.
We met up with Len at 4:30 and got a scoop of incredible sardines! Best all season so far. We made way for the 182 in pretty choppy conditions. Normally, I would have stayed at the docks, but it was Len's opening so we hoped to make it happen.
Water was dirty and wind was blowing from the NW at the get-go. Red Ski in the morning, sailor's take warning was pretty spot on, even though it was a nice sunrise!
We metered at the inner banks and tried trolling some Madmacs and Spreader bars around for nothing. They were definitely tuna marks, but definitely weren't on the chew, so we continued out.
We metered a bunch of bait and marks about 5 miles further than our first stop and this looked promising! We tried drifting baits for nothing, but the baits were crazy strong and stripping line at times! We then switched up to the spreader bar and after a little while had a quick screamer on it! Unfortunately, as quick as it hit, it was off. Not sure if it hit the wrong squid, or just tangled in the lines on the strike.
We came across a few paddies that were pretty broken up, but didn't see anything and/or couldn't get anything to go so we kept pressing west to find the clean water. We got to the 182, but the wind was a steady 15-20 and white caps abound. We trolled and trolled and stopped at every paddy we saw.
Unfortunately, we were watching the wind waves and small period swells combine and start rolling the paddies and start breaking them up. We then had another screamer on the spreader bar, but same results as the last blind strike and it was gone as fast as it was on.
By 4:00, I was pretty much tapped out as the water was ugly and we had little visual evidence of much life out there except for a small pod of fast-moving dolphin and a lone off color Mola that I thought was a megamouth shark for a few seconds since it was hard seeing through the wind chop/ripple.
Even the long range boats were having a wet go running into the wind heading out to what looked like a Catalina/Clemente direction.
We continued to troll while I tried to rest my back from all the boat pounding all day. Finally around 6:00, we called it quits and made the pounding run back to the ramp. You would have thought that the run with the wind at our backs should have been easy, but the swell and wind waves continually drug us back and then made us surf the front sides when he powered to get over the wave.
Still a fun day, but days like that make my 50+ year old body sore for days as I'm not in any good shape these days.
Fun fishing with you Len, and we'll get your bucket list fish here this fall.
Thanks for reading! Next time....
