Venice Sport Fishing Report 5/20 5/25

[Captain Mike Ellis]

Where do I start at. I have had several great trips lately. Last Friday I had a local group out for some tuna action, We left the dock and headed out of Red Pass since there was some late season fog. Plus that’s where the poagies have been. With our offshore biat being hard to locate and once you find it hard to catch. I decided to net poagies. After tossing the net a few times and the livewell full of what I thought was going to be prime tuna chow. From there I headed offshore to Medusa to find to other boats fishing it already. One boat already had a few fish. And there were some smaller tunas on the surface. So with not much action I deployed two livebaits. As soon as the second bait was out the first one got hit. But it was a swing and a miss. We fished for about another hour with nothing to show for our efforts. By this time the hot offshore water had pretty much killed off our bait. So it was off to the southeast to Mars. As soon as we got there we could see good quality fish on the surface. We decided to chum since the bait we caught on the way to mars was to small except for three of them. The chum worked very fast with us hooking a yellowfin within a couple of minutes. This fish turned out to be in the fifty pound range. Went back to the spot and one bait in one fish. This tuna was a little larger. So with high expectations we made another drift with the same results. And the third fish was in the 70-80 pound range. Well we couldn’t make it happen for a fourth. So we decided to run in for some Aj’s. But as luck would have it the rigs that I wanted to hit had about a 6 knot current running through them. With 48 ozs. Of lead the baits were still on the surface or so it seemed. Back at the dock we offloaded our catch of three tuna to find out that not a lot of tuna were caught. Most of them were caught by just a couple of boats.

On Saturday and Sunday I was asked to run a 35’ express sportfisher for another outfit. The goal of that expedition was bottom fish. We had a group of retired millitary members and there wives. I from Oklahoma. As usual the women caught the best fish until right up to the end. On Saturday we were on the fish but my crew was not quite up to the task. Afterall pulling fish from a rig is not like catching a catfish or bream. Saturday was our best day for big fish. We got constantly smoked by extra large snapper and grouper. At the end of the day and the smoke cleared we had 14 red snapper to 23lbs. And 9 scamp to 7. The highlight was a 53lb. Warsaw.caught by Mark Carson. We also caught a smaller one that we were able to send back to the bottom alive.
The warsaw on Saturday were huge and in 300’ of water. I could not even manage to get them up. The only way we got the one we did is he made a mistake and zigged when he should of zagged. Dropping down half a hardtail was the ticket. We had one that I thought gary was snagged but when I took the rod to ge it unhung. The fish just swam away like it was not even hooked. The 250lb. Power Pro and 300lb. Leader was not enough.

Sunday found us in the same area but with slightly smaller snapper but coming in two at a time. The biggger fish were eluding us but we stuck with it and hopped around until we found them.My crew was better prepared for what was at hand and they did a good job of it. I have to Give it to Gary Armheart he stuck with a big bait all day waiting for that one bite. We tried to fish a few rigs that have been producing but we got ran off of them due to rig work. So I decied to haed back towards South Pass and hit a few rigs along the way. This turned out to be a good choice. Since the next rig we tried to the west on the first drop gave up a 24lb. Red snapper. And then it started I was dropping a bait down. When I had to rebait a hook so I stopped by rod about halfway and turned my back. I heard line being ripped off of the spool. So I put Donna Carson on the rod and she promptly brought in a cobia in the fifty pound range. So now all of the baits are down half way. And another slightly smaller cobia comes to hang out with his brother in the fish box. We have time for one more quick stop to before our appointed dock time. With one biat halfway down and the others on the bottom. Another cobia joins his friends in the box. The next rod put halfway down. Bent into a postion no cobia could manage to do. The fight was on as Tony took the rod and went to work on what later turned out to be a 66lb. Warsaw grouper. Final tally for the day was 18 red snapper to 21lbs. 10 scamp,3 cobia,1 warsaw.

I had a few days off before my next trip which was a marlin/dolphin trip. I had Gary Hariken from MYLURE on the boat. The dolphin where thick as fleas on the rip which was situated about seven miles offshore of the 93 block of rigs. It was the picture perfect rip with green on one side thick grass and electric blue on the other. We only kept twelve dolphin up to about thirty pounds or so. And we had a nice blue on for about a minute. We also saw two more marlin but we didn’t get a hook into them. On Sunday while I was rig fishing there were 11 blue marlin tagged and on Sunday there were 5. All of our fish yesterday came off jethead MYLURES. The hot color was orange/chartuese. I will be back out there this weekend looking for a big girl to dance with my clients. The fishing is on fire right now hopefully it will only continue to get better. Pics to follow this afternoon.









Captain Mike Ellis
www.relentlesssportfishing.net