Well porter and I went out for a kick at the cat yesterday. It was supposed to be <5 knot winds in the morning and blow up to 15-20 knots around 13:00.
We were heading out of the river at 04:00 and the rollers coming past the river mouth were, um, large. And breaking. The boat in front of us turned around.
I tried timing my exit between a set, cut left and got away from where they were breaking before turning east to run out. The swell was large but there wasn’t any wind chop. The waves were square with a back on em and once out past the breakers it was pretty good. I looked at the live wave monitoring site when I got home and it said the swell was between 5-6 meters that morning. It was like running up and down hills though without any chop, we didn’t fly off the top of them and punched out at about 25 knots.
We dropped a spread on the banks and I was just putting the last line out when we had a rod go down. I grabbed it and a second line came tight. I brought my fish to the boat and found a 3-4 kg yellowfin. Porters fish felt bigger but he lost it before we saw it. I got the lines out again and we made another pass. Two more lines hooked up. I landed mine, got a quick pic of porter on the rod and he managed to get his in the boat as well.
We circled the area a couple more times trying to find the school and picked up three mahi all between 80-90cm. No pics of them in the boat (or the tuna) but I got one pic of a mahi on the line behind the boat. Either way the kill tank was looking good.
A couple more laps and all we managed was a mutton bird who swooped in to take a gar, got wrapped up in the line and we had to drag him in to release it. They bite when you grab em, ungrateful birds.
We then started trolling north toward the hards. By 8:00 the wind started to pick up and the ocean got choppy. To make matters worse the swell was from the east and the wind from the west so the chop and swell were opposite each other and the sea state was confused. It was hard to get anything to swim right and we did a lot of banging. There was also a lot of spray coming into the boat but we soldiered on. Around 9 we passed Rosie in his boat up by the hards. He had one good wahoo and a missed strike but hadn’t seen a billfish.
We trolled all day, the only thing we caught was a skipjack which got filleted for bait. About 14:30 we had a strike on the long corner that didn’t hook up but we had bill chafe on the leader so it would of been a marlin. The wind was howling, somewhere around 20-30 knots and the seas were gross so we pulled the gear and made our way home running with a beam sea taking the spray over my side of the boat which kept my sunglasses wet most of the ride in.
Overall, the morning was great. The sashimi and yellowfin was much appreciated but the billfish continue to frustrate us. Maybe next time.
The tuna
And Rosie’s neighbour holding the wahoo they caught.
