Tricia is out of town at her niece’s baby shower, leaving me with the kids and the puppies. Fed the puppies and took the kids fishing. I’ve been taking my son, Cameron, out after big rockfish since he was a little thing. My daughter, Casey, had never caught a big rockfish and was not sure she wanted to now. I got her to go when I said that it sure would make a good photo for your Facebook page. We left out of Rudee this morning and put out a spread well away from the fleet. Casey was not sure that she could handle a big rockfish but I was sure she could. The bait was thick and we snagged a couple menhaden then the Stretch 30 gets bit. We get her on the rod and put the boat in neutral as the fish is taking a fair amount of line. Cam and I clear the down rods and she is still not doing anything with that fish. I look at the drag and it is where it is supposed to be. Now I am thinking that maybe she cannot handle a big rockfish. We go ahead and clear the other lines that we were going to leave out and I start backing on the fish to help her out. I cannot catch up to this fish and it finally dawns on me that she is not hooked to a rockfish. She tuffs it out for a good while (she will have no problem handling any rockfish out there), sitting on the cooler some but mostly standing up. She never quit but I went back and checked on her and she could not feel or straighten her fingers. I asked if she would let her brother work on it awhile. I think that is when the fish officially became known as “stupid tuna”. Her brother fought the thing for a good while with no belt and we gained on it pretty good. I told Casey that if she wanted to be nice, she would go put her belt on her brother. Later, I went and put a harness on him. During the fight both Brandon Bartlett (mating on the Virginian) and Charles Southall (on his boat) called me and when they found out what was going on, both offered to come over and jump on my boat to help land the thing. We told them thank you but to keep on fishing and we would see what we could do on our own. Cameron fought the thing for an hour and half or so after Casey’s time on the fish. He got the wind-on leader on the rod numerous times. I would leave the wheel, jump over a cooler to the back of the boat while Casey handed me the gaff, and then the fish would take off again. This happened at least 6 times and when I finally got a good look at the fish, we had another problem. This one was not as big as the one we caught last week, but it looked to be another “over”. We had already kept our one for the year so it looked like this fish would have to be released but dang, after the work those kids had done on this fish, I wanted to be sure. I was not really sure how I was going to manage to measure and either land or release that big tuna with a Stretch 30 in its mouth. A couple more times to the leader and the decision was made for us as the leader popped. It was probably a good thing.
I called Charles and told him the outcome and he said that they were now hooked up to a tuna and his son, Hunter, was on the rod. They had it on a little better stuff with more of a tuna crew on board. In addition to Charles and Hunter, they had Larry Horne and Gabe Sava on board. Gabe was the angler on the 305 pound fish we landed last week. This fish was on a tandem rig on a 50. The trailer was a blue/white Ilander in front of a rigged bluefish. The bluefish idea was something that Charles and Gabe had come up with. They thought it would look more like a menhaden than a ballyhoo would. I told him that my kids were done and that we were headed in for lunch. I kept checking on them giving such encouragement to Hunter like “this Rudee burger sure is good” (Hunter loves Rudee burgers). After a stand-up fight of about 2 hours, Hunter brought the fish to the gaffs and now, the Special Kate, has landed their “over” for the year. This is actually the first tuna caught on Charles’ boat. One heck of a first! The fish weighed in at 262 pounds. That is Hunter’s biggest fish to date but as much as that kid fishes, it won’t be his largest for long.
Both Charles’ and our fish were hooked about 2 miles off the beach in front of the hotels.
The Virginia bluefin bite just will not stop. Crazy fishing. It is February and we are still catching bluefin tuna right along the beach. It was beautiful today, sunny and calm. There were only a few boats out along the VA Beach oceanfront but those out there were tangling with bluefin tuna. The best bite was from the Golf Ball to the condos at Sandbridge from 2 to 8 miles off of the beach. We hooked two. We pulled the hook on one. Michael Hurst (Gloucester) caught the other one. Both were hooked on the same Stretch 30. This was Mike’s first-ever bluefin tuna. It had a fork-length of 62 inches and weighed 133 pounds. While weighing the fish at Inlet Station Marina, another boat came in with a tuna twice the size of ours. They caught it on a 6/0 after a 3-hour fight. A 47-pound striped bass was also weighed in while we were cleaning our tuna. 
