It was nice to finely get back in the saddle after dealing with both Gustave and then Ike. I had Anthony Michael and Jeff Fusilier in from Little Rock. After a few reschedules due to the north part of highway 23 being flooded. We hit a picture perfect weekend the biggest wave we saw all weekend was from a crewboat. On Saturday I made a decision to make a real long run to where I thought we would have the best shot at some decent tuna. A push of barely legal yellowfins came in after the hurricanes, and that is not what I wanted with only two guys onboard. The run out was pretty uneventful we did come across a huge leatherback turtle which Anthony or Jeff has never seen before. We finally got the rig only to find not much going on. But a quick check with the sounder showed some promising marks. Out went the baits it took about 15 minutes to get the first bite was a swing and a miss. The next to bites came pretty quick after that and it was a double header. But neither fish was taking much line at all. Jeff's fish was taking the most line but still not much. Anthony had a rainbow runner, which went into the box for deep drop bait the next day. Jeff worked his fish to the boat and it was a 30" yellowfin. Not the size of fish I wanted to catch for them but at least the skunk was off the boat. On the next bite the fish was finally taking some line things were looking up. Anthony worked about a 70lb yellow to the boat after some grunting and groaning. After that I started live chumming and we quickly put two more 50-60lb fish in the boat then another 29" fish. We finished up with one more fish at 1:30 and headed to the dock. The fish were all on 60lb fluoro and 6/0 Mustad 39952 circles. One the way in about 30 miles from the pass in nasty peas green water we came across a pod of about 30 or so whales. We were able to get scary close to them we could of scratched their backs. We shot a few pictures and left them to do whatever they were doing.
On Sunday I only had Anthony onboard he wanted to try his hand at deep dropping and I was pretty sure that nobody had hit the area I wanted to hit. So with high hopes we set off with a tight time schedule for the trip. We crossed a nice rip and made some bait just in case. About five miles from the rig we came across and pretty big patch of grass. A cast with a popper brought out the green hornets a few freebie livebaits brought out even more. Anthony wanted to take a few of the chicken dolphin home to one of his employees so we put a few in the boat. I glad we had those because at the first rig the only thing I could get to bite was sharks. After losing more rigs and lead than I wanted to we left for my backup rig. Again more sharks but at least we were getting some nice bites when we could hit bottom. I had to use 5lbs to hit the bottom in 750' just to get past most of the sharks. Finally up comes a decent yellowedge then a couple of nice fish got us in the rig or straightened out hooks. It was time to get Anthony back to the dock so he could get home. But with only a handful of dolphin and one grouper in the boat the schedule got thrown out. And a few more drops were made and few more decent grouper were put in the fishbox. After that we left them biting about an hour later than Anthony's scheduled time to be at the dock.