A while ago, my buddy wanted to stuff 5 people on my little skiff or borrow a buddy's boat to take everyone out. I said fat chance and if he rented a boat, I'd be more than happy to bring the rods and tackle as well as captain the boat. He looked around and found a 22' Cobia for rent that had all of the fishing needs and would be ready for us the minute we got down to the ramp.
Morning finally came and I even left 20 minutes early to get down to the ramp so I could go over all of the essentials as well as safety things on the boat. I get on the 52 to a WALL of lights at 5:45 am!!!! f@cking multiple accidents a few miles down the road and traffic was moving about 2mph. It took almost an hour and a half to get to the ramp... They put K-Rail up as a divider, so there was no place to turn around and I was just stuck in the gridlock.
The wind was from the south, so it was going to be a wet ride home. It was blowing about 10mph when we first got out, but eventually picked up to a 15-20mph stiff south wind.
We stopped in LJ and had a great showing of Calico. My buddy Craig's kid is not a fisherman at all, but he did pretty good at the catching part. Only issue is he wouldn't hold any of them... lol
We found some bonito, albeit small ones...
Craig's father in law id from England and a huge carp fisherman out there. He's a director for one of the big fishing clubs, but never has been out saltwater fishing. He had a blast and the hot hand with the bigger grade calico. He really was stoked to catch so many.
I don't know if you realize how many birds are in the pictures, but these guys just wanted to cast out instead of dropping the baits and I had to remove no less than a dozen birds that they hooked. For whatever reason, they let the birds eat the bait before trying to get the bait away from them. Plenty of pics on my buddy's phone of that fiasco. Storm Petrels, Seagulls, Cormorants... everything except pelicans.
We made another move to look for great whites while looking to catch bass and butts. The boat seemed a little slower than usual, but we didn't think much about it at the time. Nothing there, so we went back to where all the bass were.
Boat was running really slow and we noticed the bait pump stopped when we finally got back to where we were going. We moved over what bait we had alive to another tank, but it was disappointing to say the least. The bass and birds were still there!
We had our limit of bass so I dropped down a little squid tipped jig and caught the assorted rockfish and whitefish.
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Whitefish were a little bigger than what I've been typically catching the past few years.
Ed was just putting on dead sardines with a rubber core and putting it in the rod holder... EVERY TIME he was bit! I couldn't believe how aggressive the bass were to attack huge DEAD sardines!
Then Craig opens up the center console hatch which is the dry area in the boat and it is filled with water! The entire cabin area and all of our stuff was in there! I immediately looked for a hatch or access to check out the bilge and it was filled with water! At least 300 gallons and the bilge pump didn't work! The wind was blowing 20+ from the south at this point and we just called it and tried to make our way back home as there was no way to drain the boat.
The boat at wide open throttle only was going about 8 mph. We took ythe inside route to try and escape some of the wind inside the kelp and all of a sudden, the motor over heated and stalled. The surf was right next to us and I was scrambling to find the anchor while Craig tried to see what was wrong with the motor. We started it back up after removing some sea grass from the motor and just low RPM'd it back to the ramp as it went 7mph at half throttle and only 8 mph at full throttle.
I was never so happy to make it into the inlet. We took a quick pick of a couple of fish before I got to work cleaning them.
The guy showed up at the ramp and we got it on the trailer thankfully. He said it just got back from the shop and was supposed to be in A1 condition... well, he's never seen so much water come out of his boat before...
He gave my buddy a discount for all the issues and everyone was happy, even though my nerves were shot between the weather, playing deckhand, and having to navigate the boat issues in rough water. Well, it all worked out and I'm not hoping to do that again anytime soon, but that bass bite was pretty incredible!
Thanks for reading and until next tide!
