My buddy wanted to get out and get some tuna on his fairly new boat and I shuffled my weekend plans to help make it happen. Plan was to run to the 182, but we wound up going 5 miles west of the 43. The weather was calling for small stuff in the morning and getting nasty by the afternoon. As my buddy found out, the marine forecasting is TERRIBLE. Huge swells and lots of wind made for a bumpy ride. At least they were wrong about the afternoon and we never got any real wind.
The water was all cold and not as clean as I would have liked it.
We were the first ones to get bait and out on the open seas. The moon looked like the sun.
Beautiful sunrise and the hunt for paddies started.
There was barely a paddy. We saw no life at the corner, 182 or 43, but at least there were some cattle boats out there. We did not find a single paddy by this point either.
I was getting that feeling I usually got this year when tuna fishing this year. Should have been here yesterday (also as the radio chatter was letting everyone know).
We went over the actual high spot and I was like, I'm dropping one down. 45 miles out and I want to catch something to say I'm not going to get skunked on another offshore trip.
The plan worked, but I was hoping for something besides a boccaccio.
We finally found a nice paddy while on the troll and we expected some nice fish to be swarming it. Instead there was about a TON of BAIT on it. Holy crap, it was everywhere, but no gamefish.
We trolled and trolled and trolled and saw nothing. We were thinking about calling it the day when some radio talk gave numbers that were quitting for the day with a bunch of big yellowfin. We saw it was only 6 miles away and went chasing radio fish... as were another 6 boats that quickly showd up.
The one boat had some monster yellowfin crashing their chum slick and we watched them pull a 65# over the rail. We had a bunch of tuna under us as well as a bunch of bait, but couldn't get them to rise. We chunked, chummed, and literally threw the kitchen sink at them for nothing.
I was still feeling good about getting one here, but my buddy was like "I'm done, let's get in". It was a long day out there and his boat, his rules. I was still stoked to see such big late season tuna, but there's still a few months left to salvage 2023. I'm trying my best to keep up with the positivity.
It was pretty sweet just pulling into a slip and not having to deal with trailering the boat. I was pretty stoked.
Anyway, that was my fishing for the weekend and at least I can say I wasn't skunked even though I caught the smelly Boccaccio. lol
Thanks for reading. I'm sure I forgot about a bunch of fun things we saw out there, but no tuna, so the story ends here.
