Monthly Archive

Steven Covington and his crew from Meridian, MS, should thank Mike Shankle. After going 1 for 9 on wahoos the day before, we somehow turned it around, going 5 for 5 with Steve and his buddies, and putting the boat back closer to “even steven” for the 2 day wahoo hook-up ratio. You know what we did differently? Nothing! That’s just wahoo fishing. Here’s Duncan with the last ‘hoo of the day that weighed in at 84#, our biggest so far this year. After a long initial run, this fish really threw us for a loop, wrapping the line around one of the lower units. Miraculously, we kept the wahoo on the line during an involved untangling procedure and ended up with a nice box of wahoos.  

Holy mackerel were there some boats offshore on Sunday. Apparently we weren’t the only ones that heard about the good forecast. After a slow day on the Lump the day before, our plan was to troll for wahoos, but there was one problem: there were already 5 boats at every rig by the time we got there…and we didn’t leave late. That’s when we had to get creative. After fishing a couple underwater structures, we finally located a pile of wahoos without another boat in sight. If you wahoo fish much, you know that a hook-up ratio of about 50% is par for diving baits, and that on any given day, you could be on the up or the down side of that ration. Well, Mike Shankle and his brother from Shreveport, LA, were on the down side. I’m not blaming them at all, but it was just one of those days. We couldn’t keep a wahoo on the hook to save our lives. Fortunately, the one we finally caught was a good one. After 8 bites without happy endings, we finally landed this nice 56# wahoo. That wahoo, plus our limit of beeliners from earlier in the day, made for a decent bag of fish for the boys from Shreveport.  

If I was young Louis here, I would stick with my current fishing partners. The crew let him catch the first tuna and the first wahoo of the day. At the end of the day, he tried to argue that you kept what you caught, but once the bill showed up he was more than happy to share.

Here’s a cool catch from a windy day of fishing some of the East Bay rigs: a rock hind. We see a fair number of these guys when we’re diving the rigs, but this is the first one I’ve seen caught on a rod. If you can believe it, the secret bait was a piece of shrimp on a 1/2 oz. jig head. This was just one of many cool fish Eric and John from Wisconsin and Minnesota caught with us on their 3 day trip.