Last weekend my buddy messaged me saying things came up and he can’t make a rental charter through SlayDay he and two buddies already paid for. Asked if I’d like his spot and if I’d drive the boat…. Heck yeah I wanna drive the boat!
One of the guys had car issues (drove through an exit only and lost two tires…. 😅) so it was my son, Mike and I ready to find some meat!
With the exception of a few sport boat charters, Mike had never been on a small boat in the open ocean, his thing is chasing halibut on his kayak and chartering trips with the boys.
We launched out of LB and I zigged for the big chloro break everyone’s been eyeing and plucking tuna out of. Zigged so hard I almost ran into two sieners between the 14 and 279. They were working a 70 degree break with a hard drop to 68 on one side. So we zig zagged through it and dropped some feathers on dolphins and eventually found ourselves in 66 degree water…. Went back to the warmer water and found a paddy, soaked baits on it for nada, listened to the radio and stared at birds aimlessly gliding and swooping …. This sucks.
Decided to Zag and head to cat and soak live baits for halibut and maybe yellows or just pull on bass while we came up with a plan.
On the way over I hit another drop in temp but this one had kelp and grass. Stopped several times, killed several baits and we all gave each other that look and sigh several times.
Decided to stick with it and see if we could find the other side of the cold water pocket… cruised for around 10 minutes and saw a bunch of birds, then breezers, more birds, more breezers, big breezers, bluefin that aren’t scared of the boat. Another boat also saw this and we cruised up to them and got on either side of a mass of breezing 100lb fish and started throwing everything we had at them… weren’t interested.
A couple more boats come in and kites start going up… I don’t have a kite, but there’s now a dozen big spots of fish within a 2 miles radius.
Let’s pull a madmac around them. So we put out a pink mad mac and do a huge circle around all these busting fish and diving birds and when we’re about to get half way through one decides to eat it.
Mike got on the rod and quickly declared this a big fish. He tagged me in and I agreed.
Spotter plane started circling and I assumed he was taking pics of boats hooked up, he came in low and circled us several times as well as a couple others. I got ahold of Carl (@airpilikia) later and he sent me a file folder to choose pics from. I’ll have a couple to print out soon.
The boat was supposed to come with “gaffs” so it’s the one thing I didn’t bring… we had one small aluminum gaff.
The fish came up and we agreed that gaff might get lost and one of us might go swimming in the process, instead of debating on who that might be I just kept the rod in my hands and told him to wait for a good shot 🤣
We got the shot, the hook wasn’t big enough to grab much of the head and it pulled out. Got a mouth shot and it shook loose after a few seconds… eventually he got it in the gill plate and I put a rope through its mouth. Taped out at 64” fork.
Mikes new PB and a successful “guided trip” for me 🤘🏽 might make this a career…
I can’t forget that Donovan was steering the boat and recording with an iPhone the whole time. He did an amazing job.
