We had another awesome tuna trip on Saturday. Left Seattle around 1PM for a trip over to Neah Bay. We got held up at the Ferry due to a train stuck on the tracks for around 30 mins but we made it to Port Angeles by 4PM. Stopped at High Tides Seafood to load up on flake ice and after they processed our charge card for $45 was told they didn't have ice (they were busy loading large totes for some commercials). Since there is no good ice in Neah Bay, I stopped and chatted to the guys and talked them into letting me come back in an hour and told them I'd make it worth their while. We had a beer at a local restaurant and picked up our food a 12 pack of beer for the ice guys. Got back to High Tides and our ice was waiting for us. Whew - problem solved. Fueled and loaded up the boat on Friday to be ready for a 6AM departure on Sat. As I was doing better on green clones last week than X-raps, I readied an arsenal for Sat. The P-line jet heads have been working well for me lately.
Got off the dock at about 6 and motored out. There was a little fog in the straits but it cleared up nicely once we got outside. The water was calm with 3' swells at about 10s and almost no wind. We road out to the S. end of Nitinat Canyon and had lines in the water by about 10:15. Along the way I chatted to Slivo on Why Knot. He was planning on working the N. end of Nitinat. We trolled for a few hours with no hits and no obvious signs of tuna or large flocks of birds. Tuna Don was working farther N. and Slivo started trolling his direction as there was better action up there. Eventually Why Knot was starting to get hooked up but we still had nothing going on. So around 1:30/2, we picked up and ran 18 miles up to Louden where Tuna Don, Slivo and a few others were fishing. By the time we got to Slivo's coords, his bite had died down a bit but Tuna Don was on fish about 2 miles west. So we ran out there and within 10 minutes of deploying lines we had a double. After that it was singles and doubles with a triple and a pentuple thrown in for extra fun. We got all 3 on the triple but only 3 out of 5 on the pentuple. With only two guys, it's tough to get
'em all. Here's my buddy Brad fighting a fish.
...and putting one out of it's misery
... the final result
Remember a few posts back when I said one of the reasons why I keep going out was the hope of landing something different - like a blue fin or a dorado? Well look at what I reeled in -
YELLOW TAIL!!!
Everyone was doing well out there - here's a few of the SFBC guys on their boats
We wound up with 22 albies and one yellow tail. Thanks so much Slivo and Tuna Don for putting us on fish. Hopefully I'll be able to return the favor at some point in the future.
Last but not least - here's the image of what we had for dinner last night. Hamachi sushi on the boat.