Fishing world: Missing in action!

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Missing in action!

It has been an outstanding week with sailfish, striped marlin, dorado and wahoo providing an incredible amount of action. A huge volume of gamefish are spread out off shore over most of East Cape's waters. Boats can head out off shore in almost any direction and find fish. The key is finding bottle nose porpoise and storm petrols working. Find the birds and the porpoise and the fish are sure to be close by.

Finding live bait has been a difficult and sometimes impossible task but ballyhoo have been working well. I believe it is the many pods of bottle nose in the area feasting on bait that has made it so difficult.

Noticeably absent from the game are yellowfin tuna. Normally here by the first part of May it is anybody's guess why they haven't shown. It is lucky the billfish have been holding up their end providing non-stop action while we wait to see when the tuna will appear. On several occasions while watching our jig pattern I'll spot sailfish under one jig... oops two jigs... OOPS every jig out there is being stalked by a billfish! Now that's what I'm talkin about. All of this plus warm days and calm seas it doesn't get any better!

We were pleased to have AFTCO's Greg Stotesbury and Vivian Hayes fish with us several days. Stotes is an accomplished angler and was blown away by how many opportunities we were presented with.