The New Year started off with spectacular weather. Calm seas and blue skies. We slept in so everyone could “recover” from celebrating the end of 2019. I got pretty wild myself. I sat up until midnight with my nephew, Jack, and went to bed. Staying up that late was a struggle for me. He had no problem. Other than that, it was pretty mellow.
We left the dock at noon and honestly I had high hopes. Live ballyhoo had been fairly easy the last few days, so I was hoping to get some today. The bait was there, but the tide was not helping. As it was only a 6 hr trip and I had hoped to get pretty far to the west looking for a Sailfish, I could not spend much time waiting for the bait. After about 30 minutes of no bait and only small yellowtails, I gave up on the live bait and we went to trolling. There had been some Blackfin Tuna and Sailfish caught late on New Year’s Eve, so I was hopeful we could get our share.
Different day, different conditions and a different results. The water was much greener than yesterday. There was no current at all and I was not seeing any bait around and bites were very hard to come by. We trolled west over what is usually very productive areas. None of the boats that were there before me were having much success. We trolled over 2 wrecks that should have been active with Black Fin tuna at that time of day with no bites.
In the end, we went to the reef and got a few bites. Fishing was pretty slow. Not the way I wanted to start off the new year. Fishing has been pretty tough in general, but when we have been able to get live ballyhoo, we’ve had pretty good success most days. Without it, not so much. Probably the highlight of the trip was the spectacular sunset on the way home. We have some cooler weather coming. That should help the bait catching and the fishing.