Day and a half 8-27-15, The Good, The Bad and The Legend

[bachiboy]

So I had been offered a spot on my friend’s two day charter, but because of work delayed too long in accepting and lost the spot. Eager to get out on the water, I looked for any possible openings that I could jump on. I found one spot open on the Legend out of H&M Landing and took it. I had gone out the week before on a day and a half on a charter and that was the first time in four years I’ve got a line wet in search of tuna. With the success I had on that trip (12 YFT, 6 skippies, it got the juices flowing again to get back out. I hadn’t been on an open party boat in probably 15 years, so wasn’t sure what to expect...kinda.

I get on board and the group of guys seem pretty cool. Got to talking to a few of them and figured it was gonna be a good group. The crew seemed to be going about business as usual with no real enthusiasm or warm greetings.

Now, before I get into this, I didn’t have any direct run in’s with these guys. They were all pretty cool to me, just not the friendliest bunch I’ve ever rode with. The skipper, Pat was nice and did his best to find fish for us. There’s nothing he coulda done about the pathetic bait we ended up with and, had we fished with a good load of dine’s, I think we really coulda done some damage. We had all macks and they were all pretty beat up...bordering on half dead.

My hopes were that with the upcoming full moon, the bluefin were gonna go on the chew...and they did, the day before, and not in the direction we went. If you go out, and want bluefin, be sure to do your research and see if the boat you’re getting on targets the fish you want on a regular basis. Call the landing and ask too. If I had done that, I probably woulda been told that I was gonna be going down into Mexico and not hunting bluefin. So be it, I’ll pull on whatever bites the line.

We get out there and start our search. We need to find kelps cuz that’s where they’d been scoring their dodo’s, yft and yellows in the preceding days. Once on our way, I go up to the bow and start looking as well. I’m not one to sit at the stern or in the galley and wait to hear that there’s sign up ahead. We spend a good portion of the morning looking with nothing to show for. I keep looking up at the crow’s nest and at the captain to make sure I’m not scanning the same side of the boat they are. At one point, I look up and the dang crewman is sleeping in the crows nest. WTF? We can’t find fish if we can’t find kelps!!! A couple of minutes later I see a kelp that we almost miss going by our starboard side about a quarter mile out and call it out to the skipper. We pull up on it and get our first hit, our only decent hit, for the morning. I got one decent dodo, 15-20lbs., and a small yft, 12-15lbs.(big for this trip). The boat probably didn’t even land 10 fish total. Lots of casualties and problems getting the group to work together. To make things worse, one of the guys I got to be friends with gets in a tangle while he hooks up with another guy that was fighting a fish. One of the deckhands walks up and promptly cuts his line. Everyone around was like “What the **** are you doing?!!!!” My new friend, George was fuming and said “I HAD A FISH ON!!!” The deckhand just looks at him and says half-heartedly, “Oh, sorry” and walks away. This same deckhand was the guy I saw sleeping in the crows nest and he ended up cutting off someone else’s fish later in the trip.

We spend the rest of the morning and most of the day looking for kelps with not much success. Around 2pm we get a call to take over a monster patty from another overnight boat that had to leave and had loaded up on YFT and dodo’s. When we get there, the deckhands had a bunch of chunk cut up and ready to use. While we were sliding up, he dumps a bunch of chunks in the water to chum. Now maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that’s the best way to get fish to come to the boat...throwing a bunch of chunks that are gonna sink out away from the boat. Well, we get some fish to come around but they never really get with the program and we end up having to pull away to start searching again.

At this point, I’ve got 2 dodos, 3 tuna and a couple skippies to my name. I also had a firecracker on that I handed off to an 8 or 9 year old kid that was there with his father. When we got the fish to the side, the deckhand told me to bounce it. I don’t like keeping small yellows, but was willing to let this kid keep it since it was his very first ever. Sure enough the fish pulls the hook and we lose it. Oh well, we ended up getting payback bigtime, but thinking about it, I wish the deckhand had tried to gaff it for the kid’s sake. Fish was probably about 4lbs.

We hit a few more kelps with meager success and come across a good one. I’m going through 4 or 5 baits till I find the one that swims away from the boat. I finally get one to go and sure enough, it gets bit. One guy is fighting a dodo and when it comes to color, we see it’s a good one. Right then mine comes into view and it’s even bigger. I immediately look around and yell for the kid to come take the rod. He comes over and we battle this thing for about 20 minutes. The whole time, I’m just praying that he doesn’t chew through my 20lb. or that the size 1 hook doesn’t pull. Dad’s taking pictures of us during the fight the whole way through. Once in range, a deckhand comes over to where we were fighting the fish in the bow, sticks the fish, throws it on the deck and walks away. It woulda been nice if he had held the fish up and let dad take a picture with the kid and the fish. Whatever...guess that just ain’t their style. So, we drag the fish to the back and get some glory shots of a beautiful 25-30lb. dodo...probably the big fish for the day.

We were told at the beginning of the trip that we were required to drag our own fish to the stern, tag and staple them and throw them in the bin to cool down (in the nice hot sun) before they threw them down to in the RSW. We were also told that there is no jackpot on this boat cuz they don’t like to deal with the drama associated with it. Isn’t it there job to control and police that kind of thing? Again, oh well, I can live without the jackpot. Just thought it was a lame excuse and that they were probably better off not explaining there reason at all.

There were also a few stops when we were sliding up to a kelp and the captain was telling us on the loud speaker to get a bait out that we all stood around waiting cuz there were no baits in the hand wells and no deckhand on the tank. I resorted to reaching into the main tank quite a few times throughout the day cuz there were no baits in the hand wells.

Well, I had conceded to the fact that I had caught a decent amount of fish (really good considering half the boat was skunked) and that with the sun going down, party was over. Right as it got dark, skipper spots a patty that we were about to run over. I had cut down all my gear except my 20lb. stick and went to work. I got two more tuna and another GOOD dodo. Fortunately, I think everyone got a fish for the day after that stop. We ended up with 33 mixed fish on the last stop. I think we could've done even better if half of the boat wasn't stacked up at the bait tank holding fish waiting for the staple guns to be reloaded during the peak of the bite. PFFFTTTT!!!!!!

We finished the day with a sub-par dinner and called it a trip. The group was less than enthused about the crew and one guys actually gave them a buck for tip. Again, they were cool to me, but they were not really nice to a lot of the other fisherman. I checked the fish count once I got home and was shocked to see numbers that I didn’t agree with. I ended up with 4 good dodos, 5 football yft, a couple skippies and a rat yellow that I released. Most guys probably had one fish tag used for the day.

It’s your call...
The Legend is under new ownership. I rode it when Shawn Towbridge (sp?) was owner/operator and enjoyed riding that boat. My brother used to ride it every week back then and became good friends with Shawn. If you want to go on that boat or have had good experiences on it in the past, I won’t say don’t EVER go, but I don’t think I would personally ever set foot on that deck. You may say, “maybe they were tired from being on the boat for so many days straight”, but they had a couple days off before our trip. I’ve done a lot of overnighters, day and a halfs and multi-day trips. This was probably the worst crew I’ve ever seen. The one REALLY bright spot on this trip was the look on that boy’s face when we landed that brute dodo. That made my day!!!!

Sorry for the novel and lack of pictures, but hope you enjoyed the read.