The Small Fortune left Saturday 4:30am from Milford with full tanks and a skeleton crew of Steve, Andrew, Artem, and me. We stopped off in Montauk for bait, ice and tackle. Ride out to Fish Tails canyon was sunny with 2 foot seas and calm swells. Absolutely beautiful while turning the corner around Montauk Point.
Total trip took 7 hrs from Milford to Fish Tails. We trolled the Tails and found not much. No tuna but lots of small Mahi stacked up under the pots. As we went passed one pot, literally about fifteen 2-3 lb mahi were jumping out of the water at high speeds towards our spread. It was as if they were mammal dolphin, the way they were breaching. They were all quite small though, I think they knocked every lure out of the clips with their aggression, but we only caught one that time.
Reports were of warm water 10 miles south of the Tails so we went there and picked up 2 albacore.
The infamous "death rattle"
Set up there for the chunk around 8pm drifting in 2700 feet of water but it got rough. Perhaps the coolest thing that happened while on the chunk was that just after dark, we saw this MASSIVE thing moving slowly at the edge of our underwater lights. Eventually it came within 10 feet of the transom and it turned out to be a giant mola mola (google it if you don't know). A very cool site and a first for me. We had few hits on the chunk and at one point I hooked into something big. Real big. It made 3 huge runs but it spit the hook after about 1/2 hour of fighting. I barely got a foot of line back from it the whole time. I had it on a 30W, so I'm suspecting it was either a big eye tuna, a very large yellowfin, or a swordfish. We had recently seen a shark, but we ruled that out when the hook came back clean with no teeth abrasions on the line whatsoever. Also, the head shakes and runs were not typical of sharks. Anyway, you always lose the big one, so no story there. Here's me locked into the mystery fish.
We had a few more hits, Andrew landed another Mahi, but we were drifting at a fast pace and getting slammed by swells. Deciding that we could not drift and fish, we came off the drift around midnight and all we could do was drive slowly west (with the waves) to the Dip. We put a couple lines out to see if anything would hit a lure trolled at night, but nothing happened. We ended up at the Dip by the time it started to get light. Then we turned around at daylight and started trolling back to where we started and we were immediately on the fish.
We fought fish all the way back to the to the tails in 6-8 plus head seas. Constant action for 3 hours. Since it was rough, we only had 5 or six lines out at a time, and each time we hit the fish, almost all lines went down. But for whatever reason, usually only 2 or 3 of them would actually hold a fish after the strike and there were plenty of skipjacks mixed in with the Albacore.
Finished fishing at 10am. We still managed full speed all the way to Montauk despite the rough seas. Total was 9 albacore to 55 lbs and 4 mahi. Also threw back probably 10 skipjacks and a few small mahi. Here's Andy, Artem & Steve with the two biggest:
In the morning, we put out our spread at first light and within the first 15 minutes we had a triple header of yellowfin tuna. FINALLY! We circled back around to try to find them again but then they were gone. At one point, we trolled through a school of porpoises that were feeding on a bait ball that seemed to be an acre or 2 in size. Somehow, either there weren't tuna around or they weren't interested in our spread.
So by the end of it, the three yellowfin were all we got. On top of that we kept 13 mahi and threw probably 10 of them back. Everyone took meat home, but it wasn't the best tuna haul ever by any stretch of the imagination.
