Howdy,
First post but long time lurker. Never really seemed that my salmon exploits measured up compared to the tuna adventures I read about. All that changed on Friday as 4grins and I lost our tuna newbie status.
It started out as a chance to get outside to chase salmon but that changed when my A-#1 deckhand, 4grins, called at 9 pm and said he read a post that said tuna were 12 miles NW of Garibaldi. So our tuna "gear" went in the boat as well. Sleep did not come easy nor the 3:30 alarm in Scappoose. We left Hammond at 6 am and had our 4 silvers by 8:45 east of #2. We had been listening to the radio and placed Double Trouble(?) at the 23 line. Funny how that kept getting further west. by the way, we fish in a Seaswirl Striper 2101 dual console powered by a Yamaha 225. We carry 105 gallons of fuel, radar, two each GPS and VHF so we are reasonably seaworthy. We are length challenged at 21.5 feet when it's lumpy, so we pick our days.
We decided that since it was a great day we would head west for 30 minutes and then decide what to do. Long story short, we headed west until we hit the 43 line and saw six boats about 11 am. Odin and Benny among them maybe? We decided to put our lines in the water and I asked 4grins how fast we should troll. He said he wished he had taken the time to bone up on the tutorials on the board last night but he didn't. Just then we got our sign! Someone on the radio asked Benny(?) how fast he was trolling. He said 6.5 knots with about 25 yards of line out, with the lure running about one foot below the surface. Thank you Dogs.
After about 10 minutes I realized we could fish more than one rod per person and we put out our third rod. 4grins had a drive by and said he was afraid he lost the clone. He added we only had three total. It was then I wondered if we had come a long way for nothing, since we were somewhat ill prepared. Just then we caught our first tuna. 17 pounds and a real beauty. We went on to catch five more in the next hour and decided to call it a day since our ice was getting skinny. We dialed in the 2SJ bouy on the GPS and it said we were 34.7 miles away. Wow, a big difference from our previous best of 12 miles offshore when salmon fishing. A great ocean with a following sea allowed us to cruise home at 35 to 38 mph. A great day covering 90 miles and burning 33 gallons of fuel. Grins and high fives carried us back to Scappoose in fine fashion.
We both realize that we did better than we probably deserved to do on our first tuna trip. Especially since we didn't have any tuna veterans with us. It does point to how well this board has educated us over the years. We are grateful to you all. The carking tutorials paid off as well, as my skilled deckhand did a great job on his first ever tuna. Now I just have to figure out how to keep him in practice! Hope to see you all out in the blue water again.
If anyone there on Friday can share with us what made that water fishy, we would appreciate the education. It was certainly blue but my transducer was showing it as 56 degree water. This could be wrong as I haven't checked it's accuracy since I did a master reboot on my Garmin last week. Thanks again to all of you and it does feel good to be a Dog. Maybe not a big Dog, but a Dog none the less.
Intro, first tuna and THANKS (long)
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