Wide open October albacore !

We had  a five man crew at ilwaco this weekend. The overall weather was very good, it felt like the middle of August but it did get pretty choppy when the wind came up  Sunday after noon. The water temp  was great 63 – 64F  and color was great also but no jumpers and not many birds to be seen. On Saturday the fishing was outstanding it took a bit to get the fish  going on the live bait but once we got them to go it was game on! and they were very willing to stay with us.

The sharks shut us down at around 3pm and we could not get another bait bite going, we continued to get  some singles on the troll but no matter how hard we tried we could not them to hit the live bait again. We ended Saturday with 80 albacore in the boat!

Sunday started much slower. A few singles on the troll but not much else, around  11 am we got our first bait stop going but just as we got things really started rolling a large group of porpoises came in and crashed our bait stop, that was the first time I had ever seen that happen! It took us a while to find another batch of fish and we had a good stop to end the day before heading in. The wind had come up and it was pretty choppy on the way in but I spotted a large group of feeding birds in the  distance we dropped in on them and it was fish on only problem is they were all mackerel. We ended the day with 27 albacore. We caught 107 tuna for the weekend. Although most of our fish came on life bait we did our best on the troll using x raps and cedar plugs. My overall feeling for the weekend is there are still a lot of tuna out there and fishing will continue to be good if the weather holds but our weather window is starting to close. Better get them while we can!

 

 

 

 

Late September tuna!

We had a five man crew at ilwaco on Sunday September 28 the overall weather was very good. a little bit of wind and some small wind waves but almost no swell.

The water was 63 degs and a very nice blue color almost perfect conditions

It took us a little while to get things going but once we did the fishing was very good. we had our best luck with live bait but  there seemed to be a good troll bite also. We had our best troll results on x raps and cedar plugs. We ended the day with 40 tuna.

 



Wide open tuna bite at ilwaco!

We had a five man crew both Saturday and Sunday September 20 & 21 and landed 96 tuna in two days.The overall weather was poor. Windy , choppy and wet. The wind blow 20knots most of the weekend.The weather conditions made things a bit more challenging, but the fish were really on the bite and that helped a bunch!

On Saturday we landed 33 tuna about half on the troll and  the other half on live bait. A strong wind from the north on Saturday had us drifting to the south very fast and was hurting our bait stops.

On Sunday the wind was blowing from the south and although the wind was blowing every bit as hard as Saturday our overall drift speed was much slower.

Sunday was a live bait show for us. It took a while to get them going but when we did it was wide open!  The tuna were hitting everything we put in the water and they were aggressively boiling  around the boat. At one point we had a four hour bait stop in a very stiff breeze. The sharks final shut us down, but it did not take us long to get another bait stop started and we left a wide open bite at the end of the day.

Most of our fish were caught on live bait this weekend but we also did well casting mega baits and trolling x raps and cedar plugs.

 

 





Tuna, Salmon, Bass, & Lings

We had a five man crew at ilwaco this weekend. The overall weather was very good, almost no wind, no swell and no fog! The overall fishing was good. We fished for salmon & tuna on Saturday and salmon & bottom fish on Sunday.
The salmon fishing was good. We had easy limits both days but it was not as hot as last week. we kept 19 silvers and one chinook. Most of our fish were hatchery and the hatcheries were running a few pounds bigger  then the  wild ones.   We had our best results in 30 feet of water off of long beach, but there are lots of crab pots in that area. Red lead & herring and  royal flash & diver were both working well for us. The birds were thick on the beach this weekend it was the most birds I have ever seen in one spot!

The overall tuna fishing was very good for those willing to wait them out. The morning bite has been very slow for most, but they are really going on the bite in the late evening!

We ended our saturday with a wide open  30 fish stop and they were still biteing when we left.

The overall bottom fishing was a bit on the slow side and we had to move around a bit to find them but once did we were able to gets nice batches of both bass and lings on Sunday.