No Bluefin

We trolled for Bluefin tuna the past two days. We fished from 2 miles off the beach on out to the Hot Dog. We spent some time on the SE Lumps, where we had one hooked up last week. We had a toothy critter bite us off at the Hot Dog. We had more bait and whales in closer to the beach. We had not caught any rockfish while trolling around out there this winter until yesterday afternoon. We had all of our ballyhoo whammed. We got them back out and it was a full spread hook-up of rockfish again. Enough of that, those horse ballyhoo are not cheap and we had not brought enough of them with us to feed them to rockfish. We did not put out anymore ballyhoo until we stopped getting rockfish bites. They liked cedar plugs also. We had guys cranking in rockfish on 80-wides from the fighting chair. We had plenty of gaffs with us for tuna but had left the landing net on the dock as we were not expecting rockfish. Most, we were able to just unhook at boat side but some we brought into the boat to unhook and release them. We did not have a net but we did have a tuna door. We used that with some of the larger fish rather than dragging them over the side. Once we got out of that little flurry, we got the ballyhoo back out and did not have anymore bites. We did hear of a few other boats getting hit by the rockfish but did not hear of any tuna encounters over the two days of fishing.