April 18, 2012 – Don’s Back For More Action! Day 1

My neighbor Cara, along with her father Don, and children Sierena and Dominique fished with me today.  Last year, Don had his mind set on a big blue marlin but we couldn’t find one but we did catch a nice 35lb short-nose spearfish.  Today, we decided to go straight offshore and look for the north porpoise school.  The trolling bite overall has been pretty slow with only one or two boats in the entire fleet finding big fish.  We needed to find a porpoise school that held fish to have a shot at catching something.  About 8 miles outside of F buoy we saw porpoise jumping on the horizon.  It looked promising as shearwaters and terns worked ahead of the pile.  We made a nice first pass and I marked a fish at 30 fathoms.  I watched the spread but nothing came to the lures.  I switched over to the greenstick right away before the fish I marked went deeper and out of range of surface lures.  As I made passes with the greenstick I no longer saw the single fish I had earlier marked.  For two hours I made pass after pass, jigging the squids in and out of the water.  I had thoughts of leaving but I knew there was a fish somewhere in the pod.  Then, out of no where an ahi exploded on one of our squids.  Don was first up and got into the chair.  He made quick work of his first and largest ahi that weighed 98lbs!  To date, that’s his biggest fish but we will be fishing again on Friday when my son Fisher (my good luck charm) will be crewing for us!