Sorry for the late report, but here you go.
My buddy Brian wanted to put his two nephews from Lake Isabella on to some exotics. We launched out of Dana at 4:30am and got in line for bait. I'm used to launching solo out of Davies in Long Beach, so it was nice to have Brian there to assist and drive the trailer. I have to say that ramp is a zoo!
Anyway we got there early enough to avoid a long line to get bait. As we got our bait, I turned to look at the ever increasing line and I was thankful we decided on an early departure. I'm told the wait was up to an hour at times. We picked up a scoop of nice sardines, but I have to admit that my normal half scoop from Nacho was much larger than the "full" scoop I received from the Dana receiver. I'm not really complaining, but I was rather surprised.
We made our way towards the 181 with a number of other boats and spotted our first paddy at greylight. I was instantly picked up by a smaller grade dodo that I proceeded to hand off to one of Brian's nephew. I grabbed another rod and threw a bait that was picked up shortly thereafter. I handed that one off to the other nephew and with Brian handling the gaffing duties we had two fish on board in short order. Now that the nephews were on the board, it was mine and Brian's turn to land a few. We ended up with 6 total on that paddy, but we lost a few as well.
On to more greener pastures. We found a huge paddy with one other boat on it and we hailed him for permission to join him and his permission was granted. It was wide open for the next 1/2 hour and we kept the larger fish and released the smaller ones. A few times we had triples going and it was very chaotic. The nephews struggled a little bit in the chaos and more than a few fish were lost, but they were having a blast nonetheless. Another boat pulled in a little later and practically sat on the paddy and the bite slowly dwindled. We ended up keeping 4 on that stop. When we decided to leave, the boat who originally found the paddy drove up to us and thanked us for asking his permission. Of course we thanked him as well. I never got the name of his boat, but what a nice guy.
We decided to make a run further out, but all the radio chatter indicated that we should turn around and stay closer to the beach. By the time we made it back to our original hunting grounds every paddy was packed with boats. We finally found one more to ourselves and we proceeded to land a few more keepers. This particular paddy was loaded with fish, but they were very skittish and we had to work hard for the ones we got.
We did a little trolling for tuna on the porpoise schools, but our efforts were for naught. We called it a day around 2:30. When we got back to the dock, it was a zoo. Thankfully I dropped Brian off and he quickly backed the trailer down the middle and we were out of the water in minutes.
Great day on the water for sure!
PS: I'll post our photos tomorrow morning.
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