June 27, 2012 – Big Marlin and Ahi Are Here!

Today David, his son Zach and their family friend and local resident Bill joined me for a full day of fishing on the Lepika.  David and Zach fished a few years ago with me and we did really well on smaller tunas and some nice sized mahimahi.  The ahi bite has been incredible the last few days with blind strikes and ahi showing up in big numbers in the porpoise schools.  We left the harbor at about 6am and headed south.  We trolled for a few hours without a bite when I spotted some boats working a small porpoise school outside of us.  There were already six boats in the pile so I went right to the greenstick.  On my first pass I marked a nice ahi at 40 fathoms but it didn’t bite.  There was a lot of traffic and it was difficult to stay on the fish.  On our next pass I didn’t mark the fish but it looked like one just had to be there.  Everyone watched as I jigged the squids in and out of the water.  Then, out of nowhere a big ahi came flying out of the water and ate one of the squids!  It was the first greenstick bite any of them had ever seen and they were all really impressed by the height the ahi came out of the water!  Zach was first up and fought his biggest ahi ever to the boat in about 10 minutes!  It weighed 101lbs!  We ran back tot he front of the school to set back up but more and more boats were headed our way so I decided to leave it and look for another pile.  We traveled farther south outside Milolii but never found another school.  We worked our way back up to the harbor when a nice blue marlin piled on the short rigger!  This time David was up and buckled into the harness.  The blue headed for the horizon with a series of big jumps.  It was David’s first blue and he had a lot of line to retrieve.  The marlin stayed on top for most of the fight and gave us a great show at the back of the boat.  David got the fish to leader in about 15 minutes and we released it unharmed to fight another day!  I estimated the blue at 200lbs!