Tuna Fishing Venice, LA!

This upcoming weekend we are heading down to New Orleans for a family cruise on the Carnival Elation with all 25 of my brothers, sisters, kids, and parents. Well, we finally talked the ladies into letting us head down a day or two early and go out fishing for Wahoo, Tuna, Sharks, and Amberjack! That means we are headed South Friday morning as opposed to Sunday morning!!!!!!

I looked at every fishing website in Venice and talked to pretty much every captain who answered his phone getting the scoop on exactly what the fishing scene is like down in Venice this time of year! Out of about 20 captains I narrowed my choice down to what I thought were the best 4 and then I hounded them for 3 straight days before finally getting an opening for Sunday morning! I talked about their boats, their experiences, their preferred method of fishing, read all their blogs, websites, photo galleries, facebooks, outdoor forums, articles, videos, tv shows, etc, etc. Basically when it comes to researching a fishing trip I dont sleep until I have all of my questions answered. I now know more about the guides down in Venice than all the guides down in Venice know about themselves and their peers....

So anyhow, this upcoming weekend the moon phase is going to have the Wahoos and Tunas feeding a bit more than normal and all the good captains were booked up. Thats where the whole 3 days of pestering comes into play and finally we were able to work out a deal with the best guides that shuffled some things around and we are headed out on this 36 foot yellowfin with Captain Trey! I dont know if you know much about yellowfin boats, but they cost about twice as much as my new house going up... Here is the boat we are fishing on:



If your looking for more information about offshore fishing in Venice, these are the guys I would recommend talking to first! Deepsouthcharters.com and Voodoofishingcharters.com. We booked Trey through Captain Josh Howard with deep south. Josh has an awesome fishing blog via his website where you can research in depth the archives of what he fishes for during the time of year you would be able to head down to Venice!! Captain Trey texted me this pic of a big yellowfin they caught last week:

Captain Josh caught these 9 yellowfin a couple weeks ago:

Here is a pic of a wahoo we hope to run into first thing in the morning:


So we fish Sunday morning lord willing and then I am going to UPS ground the fish meat back home Monday morning in New Orleans before getting on the cruise ship. When I am somewhere not able to take meat home, I use my UPS account to save about 30% off retail shipping rate and get insulated boxes that usually hold around 40 lbs of meat and some dry ice. Hoping to send about 10 or more of those boxes home with fresh Wahoo, Amberjack, Tuna, and maybe mako shark, grouper, etc!!!!

So I definitely am going to be posting pics after the trip either Sunday night from the hotel or Monday night from the cruise ship! Also we will be filming the trip, but that video will take a couple months to turn around.

Anyhow, the forecast wasnt great for this Saturday here at home, so I took Friday off work and set the trusses on my house then instead of Saturday. We got em all up on Friday afternoon and then Brook and I headed downtown Peoria at 6 pm to volunteer on a work project at the renovation of the Family Core Foster Care center. Got home about 10 pm and spent the rest of the night researching Venice fishing and then back out to the house at 6 am Saturday morning. The house is starting to take shape:


By saturday night I was pretty tired and I fell asleep a couple times in church this morning. Getting home from Church I conked out for a couple hours and now am ready to rock and roll for this upcoming week! Gonna be one of the more hectic weeks, since I have to get friday and saturdays work done in mon-thurs now due to the last minute fishing trip. If this week wasnt jam packed though, I would go crazy waiting in anticipation of the vacation. Instead its gonna fly by.