Offshore Venice October 11th
I ran a trip on saturday the 11th for Kerry of Outer Limits charters as part of a big corporate trip. We all like to only post the incredible trips but you have to post the good with the bad and the so-so trips. The weather guessers were calling for a front to come in and push the seas from 2-4 to 4-6 by late afternoon. They were wrong but only by a few hours and a few feet to start out. I got to the marina without a breath of wind so I decided to roll the dice and head to a rig a little over 90NM from the dock. As I cleared the pass things still looked perfect. That is until I hit the first of several bait stops that day. At the first spot I didn’t have a bump now the pressure starts to mount. Hey no problem my next spot is only a few more miles farther offshore and in the same general direction we are headed. But as you guessed it the bait was on vacation as they were at the next three spots. So now I am 35 miles offshore with no livebait to show for my efforts. I didn’t want to make the long run and gamble on the bait being where I was going to fish. Especialy since the bait was really thick in all the other spots I hit so far. I had to do it so off we went another 40 miles or so to the next bait (hopefully) and tuna spot. The pressure is like a ton of bricks now with no bait in the well. At least some of the pressure was off my shoulders as the next spot the perfect baits came aboard 6 at a time. Perfect right well almost the bait was there but no tuna. My crew got the bean bags back out for another 20 something mile run farter offshore. This rig had been good to me all summer so my confidence was high. Now thing started going my way to a extent. We had two swing and misses just a couple of minutes after the baits went out. Then the rainbow runners found us and were putting a hurting on our bait supply. But the action was as fast as I could get a bait out and it was most of the crews first time offshore. All the activity from the rainbow runners attracted the attention of a lone cow dolphin. Which was Martene’s first dolphin ever. The next bite was the one we were looking for and Kelly made pretty quick work out of a 60-70lb yellow. Now I had the momentum I needed and I put out three baits to double up on the deep line and a flat line. Jimmy got to eat the heart out of a 60-70lb yellow as Kelly did on his first yeelowfin also. The second part of the double was a 30lb fish that was on the deep line Mike managed to keep him out of the other line. And both were soon in the fishbox. I set back up and caught two throw back yellows. And then Mike made the call to head back since they had a charter bus waiting to leave at 5PM. This was the best move made all day. Since the front that was susposed to be on top of us was still not here. And I was ready to go to another rig. But as we left the rig I heard a few radio reports of very slow fishing and with the freshning wind we headed for the marina. The weather played out pretty nice until about the last 15 miles or so then I had to stand up and actualy drive the boat and play captain. But by the time we hit the jetty it was blowing 20-25 knots the river was even choppy. I never thought he weather was that bad offshore. Maybe it was because of the awsome ride of the 33 Freeman. All in all it was a good day no fish were lost due to tackle or angler error so we were batting a thousand right there. We beat the oncoming front in and my crew took the pot for biggest fish they had with the other boats fishing.
Capt. Mike
