Wahoo Sunday

Sunday was the original Dr. Neill’s 78th birthday. We were going to celebrate after church which meant that Saturday was my only day to fish. Saturday’s forecast was not pretty so when my mom asked if it was OK if we moved my dad’s party to the evening, I was all for that. I asked the crew would they rather fish all day in the rough on Saturday or fish in calmer conditions Sunday but I could only fish until 1pm. They chose the calm short day. We went out after wahoo. We caught 2 but that was out of about 12 wahoo bites. Some we did not find about until we checked baits and found the ballyhoo cut off right behind the hook. Others, I’m not sure how we did not catch them. At one time, we had 4 hooked up and managed to not catch any of them. One of those was being fought by Stan Simmerman when his line went limp. It had been cut right at the swivel, we assume by yet another wahoo. The last of the 4 lost was being fought by Virginia State Trooper, Josh Riter. It was his first time fishing with us and he had never caught any big fish before. It was disappointing when the hooks pulled. Finally, Jody Linthicum managed to get our first wahoo to the boat. Josh got another chance and caught his biggest fish ever earning his first Virginia Trophy Fish Citation. We had some other, non-wahoo bites that messed up the ballyhoo but without the wahoo teeth. We caught a false albacore and other boats around us caught yellowfin and blackfin tuna. There were also some billfish around with a number of white marlin being caught by the fleet. We did have one white that we were not succesful hooking. Other boats did better than us holding onto their wahoo bites with some catching double-digit hoos.