| Venice, Louisiana yellowfin tuna report for Dec
Spent all last week in Venice doing year end boat and equipment maintenance..waited until Friday for the weather to break and after re-launching the boat Thursday afternoon I was ready to trade a greasy wrench for a baited pole.. It's always tough to come off a 7 day weather layover, but we started in areas we had caught fish the week before..Had Jeff Milton and the Sylvania crew looking for tuna..spent the majority of the day looking for bait netting 2 mullet and 4 hardtails..didn't matter..for the 5 hours we spent waiting for the bite all we had was one small yellowfin and one blackfin to show..missed one big strike around 3pm and reluctantly headed north in search of jacks..and fortunately they were hungry..we found them at the 7 mile rigs about 150 yards off the platform on the NE corner of 49..they hit everything we threw at them and in 45 minutes we had caught 7 fish without losing one..diamond jigs, dead mullet and tuna bellies..didnt matter..I got back to the cleaning table and talked to a captain friend of mine who was down on himself for only producing one nice yellowfin, 2 stout grouper and a couple jacks..though he gave it his best effort I think he allowed the unrealistic expectations of his customers to get him down..some times the fish bite like mad and some days there is nothing you can do to find a single strike and some days, despite all preparation things still go wrong..given the weather and the fact that it was a long time since anyone had fished I think both of us had a sucessful day..Saturday the bite was wide open for us and just about everything went wrong..I headed out with good friend Rick Blount his daughter Casey and Ryan and Bill Flanagan on Bill's 37 Bertram for our annual year end fishing trip..we couldn't make up our minds what we wanted to fish for so we packed a little of everything..someone had stolen the large fish box so all we had was a deck box with 120 pounds of ice..could only find 7 mullet but since we only needed 4 fish to make the day we ventured off to new territory with medium confidence..first stop yeilded a big zero..a single barracuda bite left us 5 good baits and one near dead one..upon stop 2 we had a double on deployment..the first fish broke off on the run and the second at the leader after a 40 minute fight..upon tying up a new leader I found that the gap between the shank of the hooks and loop of the eye was sufficient enough to allow for a plier like effect if more than 20 pounds was applied to the 90 pound leader..even with a power snell the line would break against the sharp edge of the hook..a closer inspection of the pack revealed a bad batch..switched over to J-hooks while Doc searched his supply for better hooks and had 2 more misses..and when last bait flew off the hook upon deployment, things started to look pretty grim..put out a spread of 2 Braid baits short on 50 pound chair tackle and two skirted ballyhoo with birds long on each of the riggers on 30 pound tackle..at this point one fish would have made the trip but instead we were blessed with old time tuna action..hadn't seen a bite like this on trolling biats for many years..we made 6 passes in the next 4 hours hooking a fish on every pass..ended up with 3 very nice yellowfin from 90-150 pounds..the first fish in the box was a nice 110 pounder on a braid plug, fish number 2 was the samllest fish of the day, again on a plug..pulled a hook on 30 pound tackle on pass number 3 and broke off the next 2 fish on the 30's on the long baits..not sure if Bill will bring them on the next tuna outing but I think the fish did us a favor..the final fish hit at 3:00pm on the short plug and ripped half the spool on the first run..14 year old Casey settled into the chair while dad helped her crank - neither of them knew what they were getting into and from my view from the helm, it looked like alot of forced family fun..2 hours later we sunk the gaff into a 150# class fish that would test our collective engineering abilities in order to cool him and his two friends in an undersized cooler with 2 1/2 bags of ice..bottom line is we got the job done and everyone who got to fight a fish is sore today..I got to drive so next time I may get a turn on the rod..so long as the wrench's collect rust for the next few months I wont care..hope to get back out this week if weather allows..the way the bite has been, I doubt very seriously if we'll find them in the same place..hadn't worked for us this fall..last stretch of trips we ran in late November we found our fish at Moxie and in open water 2 miles south of Moxie, but not this week..not sure where we'll start looking next trip....Paradise Outfitters - 985-845-8006
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