Kona Hawaii Fishing Report - November 2022 wrap-up.
Fishing? We'll get to that in a bit but right now, most people want to know, "what's going on with the volcano?" We knew it was going to go off soon and last Sunday night, it did. Facebook was covered with photos taken from Kona with lava coming out of the top of Mauna Loa and headed toward Kona. It was still spewing at first light when planes and helicopters were putting videos on the news. By late Monday, the flows headed toward Kona were over after only flowing about a mile. It's still flowing toward the North but there's no population in its path.
If you want to see what's currently going on, do a search for MLcam Hawaii and go to the nps.gov site "Webcams - Hawaii Volcanoes". There are live cameras set up and regularly updated. But not right now, you have more reading to do.
The Blue marlin bite is still slow but that's expected for this time of the year. Striped marlin season is just starting but I'm not getting too excited about catching many of those. We haven't had a "good" run on those in years and just recently, striped marlin was placed on the "overfished" list. It's not us sport fishermen doing it. It's the many commercial longliners that are killing them. They are considered "bycatch" in that fishery. We should start seeing more spearfish coming in but the season on them really starts next month and hopefully, the longliners will leave some of those for us.
Tuna is another fishery that is hit heavily in the Pacific. As a matter of fact, almost 60% of the world's tuna comes from the Pacific. Most of it (by weight) is bigeye tuna but here close to the islands, Bigeye are a fairly rare catch and we mostly catch yellowfin and skipjack tuna. Here in Kona, we're getting some and the guys on Oahu are still experiencing a good tuna bite. I have heard that the baby tunas that were all around V V buoy are gone now. I'm going out soon to find out for myself.
Mahi mahi season has been treating us pretty well and those baby tunas that are (or were?) on V V buoy were the perfect size bait for them. There were a lot of boats competing for them though. Some days it was just too crowded to try so I would pick up some of those little tunas and head to the bottom fishing grounds.
I knew it was only a matter of time before some Karen was going to complain about me catching sharks because of the new law that went into effect at the beginning of the year. Fisheries law enforcement got a complaint about me flying a shark flag (and a flag that I released it). I don't need to fly the flags but I choose to do so because I always have and, 'I'm not breaking the law'. There was a time when I very rarely encountered sharks while bottom fishing and my catches were amberjack, almaco jack, giant trevally, and occasionally a shark or a snapper. Those same fishing grounds had no fewer than half a dozen and as many as fifty boats bottom fishing every day! That came to an abrupt halt a little over a decade ago when many hundreds of Galapagos sharks moved in and destroyed that fishery. Then came the sandbar sharks. Today, sometimes there are sharks around, and sometimes not. I'd rather be catching huge GT's like the one in the photo or other big jacks but when you go to the bottom, you never know what's going to bite.
See 'ya on the water,
Capt. Jeff Rogers,
http://fishinkona.com
