Tuna Fishing Baltimore Canyon 10-2-16
After being weathered out for 5 weeks or so, we were pretty anxious to get out. A Northeast gale blew all week.
The winds began to subside and they dropped the gale warnings on Saturday morning. We decided that things should be calmed down enough to begin running to canyon Saturday night for a short one day trip since most of the crew needed to be back by Sunday evening. There were no fish reports because no one fished in the gale and skies were overcast so there were no water temperature charts available. We were back to our roots and had to just take a guess at where the fish might be. We felt we had an advantage because we headed out while it was still rough and we knew most other boats would wait for the waves to die down before they left. For the record….it was still rough. Good thing a 46 foot Bertram makes almost anything a comfortable ride and allowed most of the crew to sleep!
Running out in the dark and rough weather would make us one of the first boats in the canyons for a full week and as the first boat there we figured that the fish would all come to us (haha). We chose to go to the Baltimore and started trolling 2 hours before sunrise for big eye tuna. We could not raise any tuna of any kind, but our theory about being the first boat there worked out nicely. The high Flyers were loaded with Mahi and by 8 am we had put a good catch together of Mahi and a nice Wahoo. We had to get away from the high flyers because the Mahi were cleaning us out and we were running out of Ballyhoo. We switched over to try and find Tuna or Marlin. We hooked into a nice blue marlin but lost him due to a strategic error while handing off the rod.
The weather calmed down nicely and all around we had a great trip. Nobody got hurt, we caught fish and the boat ran well. It does not get much better.