The fish were close and came in many shapes and sizes. This relaxing trip on Jason’s boat was punctuated with some good fun on dorado, yellowtail and a surprise marlin.
Summary
The short story is that we could see the hotels on the beach almost the whole time and still got pelagic fish.
Due to previous commitments, we made a gentleman’s start around 10:30am with some rare thunderstorms. The line for bait was short as most went through it 4 or 5 hours before us. We were not long from the dock when we saw good life and great meter marks.
Catch
Andy got this nice dorado about 6 miles out; we could still see hotels on the beach. A little further towards the north end of the 9, we had the trollers out when a nice sized marlin came up in the spread. I saw it coming from the roof and thought it was a mako. I watched it hit the cedar plug (clicker wasn’t on) and then come back for the black and purple feather. We had it on for a few minutes while it tail walked and jumped. Then it got up tail walked toward the boat and make a quick turn away that snapped us off. That was about the right amount of time to spend on a marlin in my opinion; I didn’t want to be there all day fighting it.
A little later we found a small paddy and pulled two yellowtail off it. Patricia, who obviously was being called Patty, pulled her first yellowtail on it.
We started to troll in at a leisurely pace when we spotted our first good bird action of the day about seven miles off the beach. We trolled right through it when the cedar plug when off. We retied it to Andy’s old 80# rig, but didn’t check the leader. The 20+ year old line and leader did well for a few minutes and we got a decent look at a big bluefin tuna. Two more runs and it broke off mid leader. That leader was over 20 years old and had a marlin on it earlier in the day; that was human error, not gear failure.
Conditions
Water
Lake pacific with maybe 1-3 feet at 12 seconds.
Tide
Seemed to be good warm water flowing north still.
Weather
Shorts and t-shirt weather all day. A bit muggy, but offshore was nice. The morning thunderstorms over land looked nasty and I’m glad they didn’t hit us hard.