Fished this past Monday and Tuesday with long time customer and friend Jeff Vadiakn and all I can say is what an awesome two days of fishing! When Jeff called me on Saturday to check the weather I told him, " The water has been dirty, the fishing was tough last week and it's going to be doable but very rough. If you want to reschedule its no problem" His response was " Sounds perfect! We'll be there!" We woke up Monday morning and the houseboat was swaying in the wind so we took our time getting up and about. We finally decided to leave about 8:30. When we hit south pass the waves did not disappoint us. The wind was still blowing 20kts sustained but we took our time and eased our way out to some rigs to jig for amberjack. The first 5 rigs produced a grand total of 3 lookdowns and one white trout. Finally at about noon we hit the honey hole and the amberjack started hitting the ice. Unluckily for the crew, there was also a bunch of Jack Cravelle mixed in so we had to wade through several of those to get our limit. We put the last one in the box about 1:30 and were going to search for grouper when I decided to make a couple wraps with some Bombers and Mirrolures before leaving. The wahoo must have been waiting under the boat because as soon as we engaged the drag on the first two reels they were screaming! In the next hour and a half we put 5 nice fat wahoo in the boat and lost 3 others. On a day when neither the crew nor I expected much we came to the dock with a very nice catch. On Tuesday the weather was supposed to be better but we woke up to a revised forecast for 15-20kt winds with seas 3-5. Fortunately the weatherman was wrong and we were greeted by 1-3s as we cleared the pass. The crew really wanted to bring some yellowfin home so we headed a little further out. On the way we stopped and hit the wahoo one last time and managed to go 2 for 9 in less than an hour. Some days that's just wahoo fishing. Their mouths are hard as rock and they have an ugly tendency to spit the hooks about three feet under the boat. Oh well. We shook it off and headed out to the tuna grounds. After catching a few mackerel and bonita for bait I set up and started chumming. As I cut the chunks I threw a few to get the slick started. When chunk number 3 hit the water a 130lb yellowfin came blasting up from the deep and inhaled it. We quickly got a hook in a chunk and fed him right next to the boat. FISH ON! The fight was short lived though because some how he spit the circle hook. I use the Mustad 39950BL circle hook for everything and have pulled hooks on only about .1% of the fish I have hooked with them. I use them because they don't pull once they are set. My best guess was that the tuna must have taken the bait so deeply that the hook never did make contact with his jaw. I told the crew, " No big deal. They are obviously here it won't take long to get another one. " In all my years on the water I should know better than to say things like that. Fish like making fools out of captains. It was three hours and a lot of chunks later before we saw another yellowfin. The interim was not boring though because we had a lot of kings to keep us occupied and on about our third drift we had a cobalt blue black-eyed visitor. Right as I started to throw chunks a nice Mako swam up to the boat and started feeding. Jeff quickly changed to a wire leader and it was no problem convincing the big shark to eat it. I have caught a lot of Mako and I have to say that this was one of the laziest. We only got one jump out of him before bringing him boat side but I am pretty sure we got it on film. I am going to review the footage today and post a video later this week. We ended the day with 2 wahoo, 2 blackfin, 2 yellowfin, a 200lb Mako and 4 tired anglers. Not a bad trip in any book! I still have days open in April and May if you want to get in on the action give me a call.You can also check out some awesome video of this trip and others by going to Youtube.com and searching "peace marvel fishing" God bless, good fish! Capt. Peace Marvel Peacekeeper Charters 504-858-TUNA (8862)
