The seas were fantastic, the swell was big at times, but really spaced out and very smooth. I am so glad that the great call was made to go with the tournament, because with no wind, it was flatter and much smoother than Friday.
We started out by running out to 46.33 and 124.50. Just about as soon as we got there we saw jumpers almost immediately. We slid up and threw bait on them and had a bait stop that went for over 2 hrs. After a couple of hours we got a couple decent fish, and one 25# fish, but just didn't seem to be getting the size of fish we wanted. I made a call to leave a basically wide open bait stop to try and find some bigger fish. At the Garibaldi OTC event we got into a similar situation and caught a whole bunch of small fish, and I didn't want the same thing to happen again. So off we went.
We ran NW to around the 46.36 and 125.04 and hit a small school of jumpers with some bigger models in the school. We pulled two 30# fish out of that one stop. The fish were very skittish and it was difficult to keep a bait stop going. The two big fish were both caught on set-ups with 20# floro top shot and small hooks. We kept working that general area but we were having to throw so much bait that we ended up using all of our 6 scoops of bait! We had a 120 gallon bait tank on the 290 Guadalupe and the amount of bait we were able to chum definitely helped get the fish going. Almost all of the fish were vomiting bunches of bait fish as we got them close to the boat, so perhaps they had been gorging themselves all night.
We trolled some swim baits for a little while and caught one fish on a trolled swimbait and pulled a couple more with swimbaits while our fish was hanging. But that ended up being our only troll fish of the day.
We ended with 38 Albacore for the day and a five fish total of 130.40# We had two 30# fish. One team weighed a 33# but didn't enter the big fish pot. I knew the feeling as we didn't enter the big fish in Ilwaco when we had the big fish. But they did a real nice job.( I forgot their team name)
We had a Wounded Warrior named Greg on the boat with us. He was a trooper and caught one of the 30# fish. We also had two guys that work at the factory on their second Tuna Trips. Casey ( Lamination Superviser) and Dan ( Assembly Supervisor) and they did great as well. With two of our regular team members myself and Rob Sanford on the boat, we were a bit busy helping the greenhorns at times, but they performed awsome!
