The tuna have finally arrived at our canyons about 3-4 weeks later than the last few years. The weather forecast was marginal but it looked like we had a weather window from Friday night through Saturday evening and decided to make a run to the Poor Man’s canyon. We headed out at Midnight in pea soup fog and had to depend on the radar completely as visibility was 50-100ft. The whole trip to the canyon and the first 21/2 hours of trolling was in dense fog but eventually the fog lifted and it turned out to be a gorgeous day. We arrived well before the rest of the fleet and our first stop was the northeast corner where we found lots of pilot whales…even the water smelled fishy. We caught several blue fin tuna but there were a lot of throw backs before we caught two of legal size. The rest of the fleet arrived and by 7:30 there was 50 boats around us and the fish went down.

 

We left the fleet and headed out into the deep. After a couple of hours of prospecting,  we found a nice school of 30# yellow fin. While working that school a wolf pack of Big Eye tuna attacked the baits.  We hooked one up and got it in the boat. The rest of the pack stayed with him all the way to the boat but we could not get them to take a bait, lure or popper. When we started trolling again, the tuna ducks were whipped into a complete frenzy and kept eating our ballyhoo. We finally had to give up on Ballyhoo and trolled only artificials but could not hook up another Big Eye even though they followed the smaller yellowfin all the way to the boat.

 

All around a very nice first offshore trip for the year.

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