I went out sight fishing for cobia with Hunter Southall on Friday. The forecast was terrible for sight fishing but we went anyway as our main purpose was to take a load of offshore tackle to the boat to get ready for our first tuna trip in the new Healthy Grin. We got out on the water, the clouds cleared , and we had great condition. We did not do great on the catching. We only saw a half-dozen cobia, catching one.
Saturday, I went out in-between rain showers and fished the Poquoson River with a sabiki rig. I was trying to catch little spot for the Flounder Bowl that is coming up this week. I caught a bunch of spot and croaker, all too big.
Sunday, we went out to the Norfolk Canyon for the first tuna trip in this Healthy Grin. The crew asked how the wind was. I said that it was blowing and reminded them that I had sent them multiple weather updates asking if they were sure they wanted to go. Steve Martin said, “yea but who do you think wanted to be the first to back out”? I replied that I thought it would be the smart one. Charles Southall thought that was funny and said that there is nobody here that fits that description. We went out and it was blowing NE 15-20 out there. It was not nice but fishable and we had high hopes of catching a bigeye like the 278 pounder that Brent Meadors had caught the day before. We had just gotten the spread out and the blue and white Ilander gets bitten. We are thinking tuna. The fish stayed down but not down enough for a bigeye, maybe a yellowfin. When we could first see color, we thought we were getting ready to gaff a big wahoo. We did not know it was a billfish until it was at boat side. Still, we were not sure what kind as it had not fought like a white and had a hatchet dorsal. This is when we discovered that we had no gloves on the boat. A towel worked and a quick look at the anal vent confirmed we had a white marlin that was quickly gotten back in the water after hook removal. Turns out the new boat is better at marlin catching than tuna catching. We just got the boat moving again and the crew yells, “fish on”! This one jumped. Another white marlin had come in and hooked itself on our tuna gear. We were more prepared for this one and removed the hook and released it boat side. I did not have my good camera upstairs to get the jumping shots. I was mostly just holding on for dear life anyway so it is probably a good thing. Two white marlin releases and we had not trolled the length of a football field. It was slow after that. We caught some dolphin. We then got our bigeye bite on a Green Machine behind a spreader bar. That thing made an impressive run straight down until the crimp failed at the hook. Later, we had another equipment failure when a big blue marlin crashed one of our baits, about 500 pounds or so. It put on an impressively violent show until the wind-on leader failed at the mono-Dacron splice.
