I chartered KCKEV and the TWO KINDS O PIE since I am in the middle of two weeks of gainful unemployment (long story, but a happy ending). Met Kev at his house at 6am and off we went.
At 8:45 we actually pulled away from the Dana Point bait barge. Not sure where 2 hours and 45 minutes went...but it did. Kevin did replace his bait pump at the bait receiver since it decided to shoot crap at that particular moment. :104167739 Quick fix and away we went with a good scoop of bait.
Idea was the 209 and stop at anything that looked interesting along the way.
First stop was a tiny little stringer paddy, I think we drifted it once and decided we needed to go where we were actually headed.
Off we went.
8 miles or so out of Dana I spotted a nicer variety of lettuce. Kevin set us up to drift it and...it was on for about the next hour.
Not huge fish by any stretch but we had yellowtail on every bait we presented. Probably went in the 5-10 pound range. Strong fish and they really wanted to get back inside that kelp once we hooked em.
Lost a couple back in the paddy, then we noticed a shark (not sure of model or size) but things slowed down considerably after that.
About 10:45 we decided to stop that and troll around a bit for that shark. NADA.
About this time Kevin gave Diamond Jim a call and we rode back into DP to pick Jim up and take him out. Picked Jim up at his dock at Noon and back to that paddy we went.
Considering Jim's health issues here of late - he deserved to get a free ride out!
We all three got bit again on that same paddy but we only got the one on board this time. By now we had pretty much shut it down.
We decided to take off for the domes and do some bass fishing. Cruised down and had live bait and some plastic working. I picked two sand bass but nothing else was around and willing to play..
Finally we went north of the DP harbor to fish one of the buoys and ran into EVERYBODY else. Seems barracuda were around - or so we think. We never got one on board - just raked baits.
Finally called it quits and got off the water around 6pm (I think).
Had a good day, weather was decent, no sunshine all day long but decent shirt sleeve weather. Water was pretty calm- not flat but decent and Kevin's boat ran like a top with his new motor.
And, I've got a couple weeks of dinner now.
Jeff