Thank you Maggie for the Pic!
First off, I'd like to say THANK YOU to Jason, Ali, Cory, Vince, and all the volunteers at BD who hosted a fantastic tourney that was well run and has definately raised the bar on how to run a fishing tourney. The sign-in was painless and trouble free, the online signup was awesome, and the after party with the raffles was unbelievable!! Thank you guys!!!!
Now for the report.
We couldn't get a decent shot on Terrafin for days due to low layer cloud level and we didn't have a lot of time to plan. Finally on Friday there was a good shot offshore that showed some promising temp breaks. So we had a plan to work way out west and follow the 1000 Fathom Curve SSE and then drop towards the Hidden Bank and the Trench to see what those temp breaks offered. We had an idea that the temp and current breaks in the 65 degree or better water would have the paddys stacked up and we ended up being right. Lots of bones and albies as we crossed over the 302 and 371 but we weren't there to tuna fish. It sucked, but we drove by area after area of puddlers and breaking fish.
We fished probably 20 paddys with no love whatsoever but on one just a little north and inside the 213 we had a BIG fish hookup on the mint 7x that came unbuttoned in the paddy. When it flashed it looked big and it sucked to lose it. We contined east from there and just below the Hidden Bank we found the pay off paddy with hookups on the mint 7x and on bait.
We saw the fish that hit the surface iron and it was big so Mark threw a bait out right where we saw another fish swirl. We had the double going and ended up losing the fish I hooked on the 7x. Mark ends up getting up and down on his fish with my dad trying to put a little boat pressure on the fish. We knew that it was big and it was taking long deep runs away from the paddy so we weren't in danger of losing it to the paddy. Mark was fighting the fish on 25# Pline on a TOR20/Terramar combo and that rod was BENDOOOOOO. 20 mins later I gaffed it in the shoulder and we had what we thought would be a winning fish so we hauled ass to the weigh in.
Our little pig ended up going 32# straight up and would end up being good enough for 4th Place overall in the BD Yellowtail Shootout. Without the awesome teamwork of my Dad at the helm of the DL during the fight, Mark with a great job working the fish, and a decent gaff shot by yours truly, we wouldn't have gotten helmet, so it was truly a team effort that made for a great day of fishing.
As a team we won the following prizes:
$2500.00 CASH MONEY!!
$200.00 Gift Certificate to Dana Landing
3 Scoops of Bait from E-Bros
7' Precision Gaff
Sabiki Rod
Chuck Byron print in a very nice frame
2 T-shirts from Kaenon sunglasses
Thanks to all the sponsors who kicked down the prizes and to BD again for this very cool tourney.
We have some lame front yard fish pics but we also have some others to follow in a little bit but here are a few:
Linear Mode
