Ladies Day Out Fishing Report 7-29-11

Sorry for the late posting but here goes the fishing report from the weekend of July 29-31.  We left Cape May inlet about 3am and anchored up at Masseys canyon around 6am.  This trip was the ladies day out so we had them doing most the work.  They were tending lines, chunking and fighting the fish.  At 10am their hard work paid off and our first line took off.  Matt’s girlfriend, Megan, got the chance to fight it.  She fought it for about 15 minutes and we landed  our first fish, a 20 lb yellowfin.  About 10 minutes later we had another run off, which was a 10 lb dolphin.  Sam (Roos’ gf) got the chance to fight this and 15 minutes later the fish was landed.  We went the rest of the day with little action.  Around 6pm we trolled our way out to the Baltimore canyon for the night.  On the way we got into a school of dolphin and went 4 for 6.  One of the missed fish was about a 20 -25 lb dolphin that was hooked on 20 lb test.  This was Mackenzie’s (Er’s fiancee) first battle with a dolphin and it was a challenging one.  I will say that it was not angling error by her that resulted in the fish being lost, it was poor end game by the duo of Er and Matt.

We got out to the canyon and set up for the night.  We had a huge school of tinker mackeral swarming around the boat and began catching and chunking with those.  We got into another school of dolphin and pulled about 3 more in, including a 15 pounder that was caught on a livelined mackeral.  Later on in the night, we got schooled up with sharks and had 3 runoffs at once, 2 bit off the leader and the other we lip hooked.  This was faught by one of our newest and upcoming anglers, Joe Voda.  It was on an international 80 and the fight lasted about 15-20 minutes when a 7 ft, 100 lb blue shark surfaced.  We released it and set the lines back out again.  Our last hookup of the night was a swordfish.  This was fought by Roos for about 15 minutes.  It surfaced, jumped and then submarined back down to the bottom.  On the way down it pulled the hook and we lost it.

Around 5:30am we picked back up on the troll.  At 8am the short flat ballyhoo took off and we thought we had a good size tuna, so we kept pullin the lines to see if we could get multiple hookups.  It wasn’t until the fish was about 150 yards behind the boat when a white marlin finally broke water.  Once we saw it was a white, Matt immediately took the reel and the crew began clearing lines.  Matt grabbed the reel and fought it for about 15 minutes.  That’s when Er’s end game was redeemed.  He leadered the fish, grabbed the bill and unhooked it.  We took a few pics and the fish swam free.  It was a great catch and release, the fish was still very lively when next to the boat.  After that hookup we trolled in the direction of home and picked up and ran at 10am.  Overall it was a great trip for the girls, weather was great, lots of action on many different species of fish and many different sizes.  Make sure you check out the video Roos edited of the white marlin!