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!