Date: 10-29-09 - 11-3-09
Boat: Pacific Star
Landing: Seaforth Landing
Captain: Mike Bullard
Galley: Mike
Deckhands: Jeff, JR, Steve
Destination: Cedros, Offshore, Geronimo, San Martin Island
A spot had opened up a few months ago on the annual Senor Tuna 5.5 day, seeing as how much fun I had on that trip last year I decided to jump on the open spot. We were all set to leave on Tues 10/27/09. Monday I get a call from Chris Bullard of the Pacific Star, they are very concnerned about the heavy winds for the next 2 day's and want to push the trip back to leave on Thursday 10/29/09 instead. With some last minute shuffling around at work I was able to make the schedule change work for me and be on this trip.
Thursday morning rolls around and I'm out the door by 3:30am, quick pit stop for gas and I'm at Seaforth a little after 5:30am. WooHooo....avoided the morning rush hour traffic. Grab a dock cart and haul my gear down to the boat. The crew and several of the guys are already there and loading the gear on board already. Get the gear stowed away and now it's just a matter of waiting for the rest of the guys to get here and off we go. 8:30am and everyone's here and there's no point in waiting till our 9am departure so the captain say's let's go and we are off.
The game plan was we were going to head south and hopfully we will get the word that Guadalupe is open at the last minute, unfortunately we got to the point where Mike had to make the decision and since we didn't get word that Guadalupe was open he set course for Cedros.
We finally get to Cedros and and after a bit of looking we setup on a spot hoping to catch some yellowtail. We managed a handful of yellows throughout the course of the day but alot of us had our heart set on tuna. Put it to a vote and we left the yellowtail and headed offshore for looking for porpoise schools and hopefully loaded with tuna. We chased the schools and although it never went wide open everyone managed to get at least a couple of yellowfin. Most averaged 25-40 pounds. We had a few that would easily go 60-80 pounds.
With one day of fishing left and bait getting really low Mike gave us the option to either continue looking for the tuna with very little bait left or take a run to San Martin and load up on some rockfish and maybe some yellowtail. We opted for San Martin and off we went.
Woke up to our final day of fishing in a fog bank near Geronimo and found a few high spots that was just loaded with rockfish. Limit's would have been easily had here. We made our way further up to San Martin hoping to maybe get a few yellow's but we wound up in a wide open bonito bite where the boneheads were averaging 6-12 pounds and also some log size barracuda. Finally had to call it quits and captian Mike point the boat back for home.
Total catch for me was 5 yellowfin tuna, 1 yellowtail and about 6 misc rockfish.
Two things I really wanted to try out on this trip was the new Avet SX Raptor and also my new 8ft Jaw's rods. The SX Raptor was awesome. Unfortunately the biggest workout I could give it was a couple of 30-40 pound yellowfin. Straight 65# spectra with a 5 ft 50# flouro leader connected via uni to uni knot and a Owner ringed flylinger 2/0 hook. I gave it line when it bite and took it's first run but after he stopped I just shoved it in full and never gave him an inch of line after that. Everytime he started to run, I put my thumb on the spool to give it extra pressure and I just turned it's head around. I was able to bring 2 of them to the deck in less than a minute each. I also had it on my new Jaw's 8ft rod rated 20-50 and that combo was great. The rod was super light, pretty good parabolic tip so tossing the bait's out was pretty easy but it still had enough backbone and shut off really well. I'm pretty sure the yellowfin felt alot more pain than I did. 4 out of the 5 yellowfin that I caught were with 2 out of the 3 new Jaw's rods that I brought with me. The other Jaw's rod I used was an 8 ft rod rated 15-40 and I had my regular SX 2 speed on there 65# spectra and a 5ft. flouro leader of 30# and ringed flyliner 2/0 hook. I did just as good of a job.
The Jaw's rods and the SX Raptor get's my thumb's up for sure.
Not a whole lot of pics this time, my camera was acting funky.
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