Capt. Mike's Venice overnighter report

[Captain Mike Ellis]

It sure does feel good to finaly be back home at Venice Marina. I do have to thank the entire crew at Chris Moran's Belle Pass Marina. You guys allowed alot of us to get back on our feet after the storm.
I moved my boat back to Venice on Sunday so that I could run a scouting and get reaquainted trip. I called up Kelly and Zane from Clinton Ms. and Will Wall from here in Baton Rouge. Will showed up with 25 pounds of crawfish so the departure time was postponed until everyone had thier fill of crawfish. Since this was a scouting trip the gameplan was to do alot of running and hitting as many floaters as possible. We left the marina with high expectation of what we would find. The first order was to secure some livebait which proved to be tough. Well it was more than tough since we didn't get any at all. So we pointed the bow south and readied the trolling gear. From the time we hit the first rig until we left the last one we were into the fish. The first few rigs all had enough 10-20lb. blackfin to sink the boat. Enough were kept to provide chum for the entire night. Now the hunt for a few yellas was on. We toured pretty much all of the floaters out there. On all of the riges we hit I marked tuna on the sounder but only the blackfin would eat. Sometime around 1 AM my crew had finaly had enough of catching blackfin. So I told them to get the beanbags out and take a nap as I took them to the last stop of the night. As I was pulling up I could see alot of large crashes on the surface at that point I thought we had hit the moterload of yellas. But the surface activity turned out to be dolphin chasing flying fish and squid. The sounder was showing the same thing it did at all of the other rigs. And that was large bright red blobs of tuna. I guess it was just time for the bite to start. Since the first piece of chum was taked from my hand about fifteen feet from the boat. Of course I still had my drags at there lump setting of twenty five pounds and the first yellowfin hookup of the night was over as soon as it happened. I backed off the drags to better suit the sixty eight pound fluro that I was trying out for the first time. The next drift was a repeat of the first except that this time we put a 50-60lb yella in the boat. Now we were into high gear and on every drift we were putting a fish into the boat. We did lose our fair share of fish to everyone being so tried from catching all of the blackfin earlier in the night. But the box was starting to fill up at a very fast pace. There are two points that stick out and have to be mentioned. The first one is you cannot stop a tuna from shaking his tail during his final death spasms. I know this because Kelly tried it. He has being shook so bad his ears were even flapping. And the second thing was as Will was bringing what looked like a 80lb class yella to the gaff. A big alpha dolphin rushed the tuna and starting chasing it. Well I don't know how he did it but he got hooked. I don't know how a 6/0 circle could come out of the tuna mouth and hook the dolphin but it did. So now we had to get the dolphin off of the line. Well he didn't like having a hook in him one bit at all. We pushed the drag to sunset and couldn't get the line to pop. So I ran up on him at 4000RPM and reached over and cut the line. Now that that was over we could get back to fishing and filling up the box. We put a few more tuna in the box. And we decide to do a count since the box was getting harder and harder to shut the lid. We thought that there were a even dozen in it. But later at the dock there was ten tuna in it from 40 to somewhere in the upper 70 to low 80lb. range. It was a long night of fishing but a good night. Plenty of tuna was divided among eveyone for future barbecues. it looks like our summer season is arriving right on time.
Capt. Mike
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