Thunderbird Overnight June 20-21
Greetings, FNN! It's been a few weeks since my last post and this will be my first ever post on this subforum for party boats. Myself and a few friends treated ourselves after an insane two week run at work to an overnight yellowtail trip out of Davey's Locker aboard the Thunderbird Monday and Tuesday.
We got on the boat about 9pm and headed out to the bait barge and loaded up with many scoops of average to good sardines. Goofy gave a great pitch about the boat's expectations, which included lots of humor I couldn't possibly recreate here in text form. His face and generally salty demeanor made it hysterical! I was also happy when he said there would be no jackpot on this boat. "We don't have any room for macho man bullshit fishing. Our goal is always to boat as many fish as possible for as many anglers as possible. So no bumping each other outta the way. You bump a fellow angler, you and I can have a long talk in the galley while every one else catches fish!"
My friends had never done deep sea sport fishing before so this very inclusive and friendly attitude from the crew and the other anglers was welcome!
A couple shots of us as we were leaving the harbor, David on the left, Ian in the beanie and myself looking like an axe murderer after two weeks without a day off leading up to this xD:
After Goofy's pitch, Brian gave us the rundown on tackle and rigging. Brian is a young dude (a baby really at only 20 years old), but was really cool, informative and eager to help out. He spent time with me teaching me the San Diego knot after recommending I use it instead of the Palomar knot. He said he was grateful that I wanted to learn rather than just make him do it for me, but I still felt like I oughta be the grateful one as it took me several failed attempts to finally memorize and execute the knot consistently.
Some good conversation and a couple cigarettes later, we retired to our bunks.
Woke up the next morning at San Clemente Island to overcast skies and calm seas. Several boats from the San Diego fleet were already working one area, but Jeff (El Capitan) let us know that they had very few hookups and that we'd be trying a different spot. It was a good call because once we arrived the new spot it was only 30 seconds before I was already ripped by a yellowtail on a hot 'dine. A fair fight later and I landed my first of the day, a solid little dude in the 8-10 lb range.
The action on the dines slowed down for me so I switched to my squid rig, and that produced more fish, but not what I was gunning for: a bunch of dinker calicos, although two were of legal size. Ripping 12-16 inch checkers from their homes on 30 lb. wasn't my idea of fun, so I went back to what worked for me earlier. "Less fish, but the target species and a worthy battle? Sign me up," I thought.
That wound up working out for me as planned: only three more hook ups and two boated fish but both were decent sized yellowtail with a mean attitude :) The rest of the boat put a ton of calicos on the boat and the occasional rat yellow on the squid, but most yellows were caught on the 'dine that day. They've stopped eating the winter food source of squid it would appear: a good sign that the waters are warming up again.
The one I lost was a real bummer for me though as it was due to a farmed knot. Went bendo, fish started a run and broke off mid run, I retrieved a curly-q line with no hook. "Rookie mistake!" I thought to myself. Oh well, it was a knot I'd never used and I was determined to bother the crew as little as possible since they already had their hands full with one ******* (didn't seem to get Goofy's message about no bumping and even got fiesty with a deck hand at one point) and about 7 anglers who spoke no English and caught more of the other people's lines than fish that day.
David wound up with one yellow and one calico. Ian was skunked :( Neither has ever cast a conventional reel before and they weren't able to cast past the mess of tangles until pretty late in the day when they started to get the hang of it.
Had the boys clean my fish for me and kept the belly meat (was actually shocked to see them chucking the belly meat out from every fish they cleaned that day. That's the best sashimi you'll ever taste!!!) to make a beautiful sashimi dinner for my wife and I. Pretty much made my money back with that meal alone and I still have easily 10 lbs of meat left in the freezer!
Was a real blast and I can't wait to get away from work and do it again! I'm eyeing late July around the 18th or later if anybody else cares to join! There might be yellowfin by then too :)
Cheers,
Cam
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Originally Posted by JTLove
