I've been trying to talk my boss Neal into taking a day off and chase tuna with the Stealth Stix crew. He finally gave into the temptation and we took Friday off to do some fishing.
Joined by Brian a regular crew member, the 3 of us launched out of Dana at 5am. That was our first mistake. You think we would have known this by now, but we were just in time to get to the receiver and watch them plug the tanks of not one, not two, but three cattle boats. What a frickin joke! You would think that while one of the receiver's attendants was dealing with them, the other would be servicing the PB'ers, but that would be too much to ask for. To make matters worse, all they had were anchovies. These guys could learn a thing or two from the Long Beach receivers on how to run a bait business.
45 minutes later we were on our way. The day started out poorly, so why would the weather cooperate? The wind was up early and so were the swells. We made our way in the direction of the 289, but the further we went the worse it got. Made the right decision to turn back to the 209.
Once there we found a medium sized paddy and decided to give it a try. Great decision! After dumping some of our dead bait the water erupted with what appeared to be tuna boils. Oddly enough Neal hooked into the first fish of the day which turned out to be a large dodo. That was not what we anticipated, but the skunk was off the boat.
Pulled back up to the paddy where I hooked up to what I figured would be another dodo, but after the first run I was fairly confident it was a tuna. Thankfully I was correct and after a short battle our first tuna of the day hit the deck.
Made another pass and both Brian and I hooked up again. In hindsight, I should have handed my second one off to Neal, but I was confident we would hook more. Made a few more passes for nothing and took off looking for more. Eventually found a huge pod of ponies and an ever growing number of boats working them. There were no less than 35 boats working what turned out to be the only porpoise we would see all day. It was chaos from the get go. We saw a few boats hanging fish, but with all the traffic, it was very difficult to get a good shot at them with someone jackass cutting them off. We runned and gunned for an hour or so, before our frustration got the better of us and we decided to call it a day.
Let me say the ride back was nothing short of brutal. The wind and swell was ridiculous. For those of you heading out tomorrow, the tuna are there and with any luck the weather will cooperate. Good luck!
Forever!)
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