We are finally into our Venice Louisiana Fishing fall season which means squeezing trips in between fronts. I fished a group of dentist from Oklahoma on friday with the forcast giving us a pretty narrow window. But fortunately the front waited until I had a couple of fish left to clean before it hit. The paln was for tuna, there are plenty of real big fish on shrimp boats but plenty of boats fishing them so we decided to make a long run south to where I had been fishing and not fight the crowd. The one thing I didn't plan on was no current but we still managed to get everyone a yellowfin. Along with feeding about a hundred baracudas in the process they always come out farther from the rig when there is no current. We had just finishhed boxing up a yellowfin when I thought I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.
So I walked back to the transom to find a 300lb plus blue sticking his bill up the exhaust of my port engine. I went into overdrive and pitched him a bait which he ate while I still had the leader in my hand. I don't think that counts as a release technicially. But still pretty cool. Anyway I feed him three times before he finaly got the hook only to throw it on the first run/jump. After that everything just died even the cudas. So we cleaned up and headed to the house and hoping to run across something in the 70 miles back to the pass. The first little break had a very weak broken grassline on it. Throw out a livebait only to have a very small blue but more than likely a white come and look at it but no bite he just faded off. With two billfish encounters for the day I told the guys the next one we would catch. With that over we continud on and hit a real nice rip about 30 miles from the pass. I went up front a threw a popper and the water turned blue and green with dolphin. These were not the jumbo models but solid 8-12lb fish. I used the rest of my livebaits along with poppers to put 12-14 in the boat in pretty quick order. But the activity with the dolhin brought us our third encounter with a blue. He came in from under the boat and smacked a dolphin that I was going to throw back. This is where I made a dumb mistake. I pulled the dolphin in the boat and put a livebait on the hook only to have the blue go crazy looking for the dolphin I just took from him. So this is my dumb move.
I took the livebait off and picked the dolphin up and threw him to the blue. But I forgot to put the hook in him. So we got to watch the blue chase and thrash the dolphin and get us wet since all this was ten feet from the boat. I could of free gaffed the first and second blue that's how close they were. What a dumb move on my part for not hooking that dolphin. Aftert that we decided we had enough fish in the box and with the sky darkening to the north of us with the approaching front. We hooked it up and ran back to the marina. We only got a little wet as the wind and rain held off until we were just about done. We had a pretty good day with three billfish encounters. And all of the icechests were filled up for the trip back to Oklahoma with happy anglers.
Capt. Mike
October 11 Trip Picture (below)
