AFW

By Jason
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Wednesday, August 6, 2009
" Fantastic, exhausting fishing "

I was on vacation all this week, and yesterday we had planned a fishing outing which would start earlier than usual.  

Today the crew would be the usual - Karla, Amber, Spike and myself.  Here's Karla getting a bunch of sandwiches ready for our outing:

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We left land at 7:30am in route to Picnic Island for bait.  We caught quite a few pinfish as well as the usual load of shiners.  We continued on to a reef about 5 miles offshore.  We got there and got setup about 9:30am.  Immediately we began catching fish.  Karla caught this fatty snapper:

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It was a very exciting start to the day.  I caught 2 snapper early on also.  Here's one of them:

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I was pretty wound up most of the morning as we had a total of 5 poles out.  I kept working them and for some odd reason they lines kept getting stuck on the bottom.  I was constantly losing my hook and/or leader.  I believe most of the instances of this was due to fish taking the lines into the structure.  I started fishing with less line out but it had become early afternoon already, and it was too late because fish weren't biting around this time.  

There was one thing I did differently today; I used fluorocarbon leader for the very first time in our fishing history.  Perhaps this contributed to the number of bites we got.  The fluorocarbon leader I was using was Berkley Vanish / 50lb.  I'll be using this from now on!

The surf began building to a nearly unbearable intensity, and everyone was feeling a bit sick including Spike who threw up a bit.  So we headed back in to the pass to get everyone on land for a while.  Everyone started feeling better, and I began catching unusual bait that I had never seen before.  It was white in color, and looked somewhat like small pinfish.  Perhaps this is what I see people referring to as "whitebait".  Nonetheless, I caught quite a many pieces of it.  

We chilled here for a while before heading back out.

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We headed back out ot the reef and enjoyed more fishing.  At this point Karla tried using squid, and we were very surprised when she began catching numerous fish - one after the other.  We believe they were grunts, and that was very fun for her.

We were bitten off several times by Mackerels, so at one point Karla wanted me to rig up a metal leader for her.  So I did this and she hooked what seemed to be a Mackeral, but her leader broke at where it had been bent and subsequently weakened.

A short time later my big boy pole went ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, and I almost fell over getting up to grab the pole out of the pole holder.  Yep, King Mackerel on!!  It gave me a good fight, and it surfaced itself, and after about 2 minutes it ended up cutting through my 80lb mono leader.  Shucks!

Later about 50 feet from the boat, a very long King Mackerel jumped about 7 feet out of the water.  It was a startling but interesting sight.

Here's another great sunset:

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We stayed out until after dark and ran the submersible green fluorescent light.  The moon was also full and very bright.  We ended up catching some squid again.

We headed home and had a hard time navigating through the bay, but got back on land at midnight.  We were EXHAUSTED.

Karla was top fisherman today.  She caught the first fish, the biggest snapper, and the numerous grunts.

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