Offshore Overnigher - Tuna - Squid and Big A$$ sharks

[UnWired]

Well, it was definitely an interesting evening and had an excellent time. Wasn't your standard cocktail hour... we were killin stuff!

We arrived somewhat late out on the water, with not much time to fish. We put in and trolled and came up with a double within a half hour. Nice medium grade Albacore! Every retroll of the area at 40.25 & 125.18 boxed more fish. We were picking doubles, triples and singles at first. Then about 45 minutes after darkeness fell, we hit a 7 hookup, 5 lines ripped, then as I backed off the throttle to go help my poor deckhands, another 2 went off. Landed 5 albies on deck and two fish were fighting rather unusual. We brought up a double humboldt squid on Cedar Plugs, lost one at the boat, put one in.






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We were going to continue to troll, but shut down and turned on the radar. There was blood dripping out of the coolers, running down through the scuppers into the water. I popped in my happy fishing music (non stop Jaws theme music through the Bose speakers on deck) and continued to fish.... Well as luck has it, sharks found us quick. We turned on the deck lights and there was a massive Thresher shark about 300++ lbs in the water. We geared up with steel leader and sent back a chunk of Humboldt Squid tentacle... The fight was on... Knocked Dana down to his knees a few times on the back deck and ripped line for quite a while. About 20 minutes into the fight and several close attempts to gaff the shark, the leader broke about 10 feet behind the boat. So much for Shark fin soup!







We played around and caught another 3 sharks (Blues) and landed a 130 - 150lber on the deck of the boat.. Released the blue shark safetly and switched to catching those Humbodt squid, energy sucking tentacle tuna! I don't know how many we caught total, but we caught them until we were completely sick of catching them. I would have rather gone to an OB/GYN appointment than reel another one of those bastards in.... Filled a cooler + and I believe Don (our partner boat) did as well. We drifted close to each other for most of the night and the wind started kicking up a little. I crawled up in the cabin and slept for a few hours as we continued drifting. I was toast and had to leave my guys on board to man the screaming 30 wide Penn VSXs.




In the middle of the evening, on our sword fish gear, we had something eat completely through 300 lb steel leader. I would like to have boated it, but never stuck. Probably a HUGE shark, or some deep dwelling sea creature that cannot possibly be landed on a Parker 2520... but hey, it would have made a nice photo and probably killed us and ate the camera and most of the boat.



Early morning, we got back up on troll and took a little bit longer to find them... they swam off. Don got a couple fish and trolled back in because of the chop. We stayed out to play because another buddy boat (Kingfisher) was coming out to play. About an hour and a half with slow bites, we started filling the box. Ended up with multiple humboldt squid, 29 Albacore, some sharks landed, lots of blood and 3 very happy, yet tired people in our crew... I'm sure Don and his son are tired also and I thank both of them for coming out and playing with us!! I am humbled by the large predators in the water, that would like to have eaten us, but didn't... It was a fun 24 hours out in the North Pacific Ocean.



Last but not least.. here's a heart felt salute to all the kind people on Bloody Decks who didn't make this trip possible... but we were sincerely thinking about you.

[reelworld]

Awesome post and pics
Thanks

[Marcus]

Well done!

[PaDDy Killer']

Excellent! How many rods are you guys trolling?

[One_Leg]

It looks like you need another cooler or two?


Thanks for the report/pics.





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[johndtuttle]

wtg slayers Norcal style .

[UnWired]

Originally Posted by PaDDy Killer'

Excellent! How many rods are you guys trolling?

I think we're running 12 rods in those photos on the outriggers. We can run more, but safetly we can troll 12 rods without tangling and can still make tight turns. If we're on top of the fish, we only troll 5-6 rods and then try dropping bait and fish traps, or iron... totally depends on the trip, the bite and the wind.

If it's flat calm, we can run 16 lines out the back no problem. The nightmare scenario is if we hook up 10 lines at once. We did have a 7 hookup and no problems tangling.

And yes, for that trip, we could have used 1 more cooler, and about 10 more bags of ice.

[redspagetti]

excellent fishing !!!!

[steve gessner]

Very nice! Good pix. I gotta do an overnight to Cordell if the weather ever lays down for more than 24hrs!