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Windfinder usually updates at 6am so we will make the call after that. It needs to improve some for the trip to go, all we need is a small improvement but it does need to be better than what we are seeing now.
New Buccaneer Spring 2022 Tuna Schedule
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1,168 Posts
Fingers crossed for improvement. I thought windfinder updates every 6 hours. Midnight, 6am, noon and 6pm. The GFS model that it is based on runs on that schedule. It will drive you crazy watching for updates starting 10 days out. Its crazy how much the forecast can swing from run to run. That said, this one has been fairly stable with only minor variations on when it lays down. I'll keep hoping for improvement. Personally 6's at 6 and dropping is fine by me. Tuna like a lil chop on the surface. (Granted I don't have to pay the liability insurance so its an easy call for me. 😃) It also looks better to the east than south. Of course we would have to run quartering into the seas to get east.
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I don’t really pay any attention to the predicted wave heights. I go by the wind speed, 10-15 nice, 15-20 rough and 20+ stay home. 15-20 is generally do able but not as much when it’s been blowing that way for several days or if we can get a decent direction to run. A hard South wind we can run East and a hard East wind we can run South but not so much when it’s out of the SE. Once we are at the floaters it doesn’t much matter how rough it gets as long as we don’t have to run directly into it going back home. We can tuna fish in some nasty stuff but getting there is the problem and once it gets rough like that it makes it very difficult to bottom fish.
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1,213 Posts
It’s like watching paint dry.
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We can’t get away with that here, 5-6 ft head sea hurts here. All the guys that I worked with on crew boats from over there say it’s a different world East of the river and it’s way more choppy over on this side, especially the upper Texas coast because it’s so shallow for so long.
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22 Posts
Back in the 1980's i worked on the Double eagle 3. It was a 83ft Cat with four 12V71's. We ran 11 hour offshore trips 60 to 100 miles offshore back in them days and had to make the speed to get out there. This is out of the west coast of FL. They stopped doing them trips in late 1988 due to bad fishing and less and less people were going. Ran them trips everyday unless the weather was really bad. Avg fuel burned was around 600 gals a day. No way that kind of trip would work today.
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1,213 Posts
Who was the builder?
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22 Posts
Queen craft. That boat sure took a beating over the years. They replaced the 4 12v71's with two Cummins 6 bangers. Now they only run 4 hour trips and do 34 hour trips in the summer for red snaps. They only run around 11 knts now. Unreal how much the red snaps have come back the last 10 years. Back in the 1980's a red snap was rare to see in our part of the gulf out to 200ft.
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What kind of boat do you run? Never fished the west gulf so not sure how much of a diff it is from the Tampa area in FL. We get a lot of Mangrove snapper over here offshore. Never dreamed i would cuss red snappers but they have become a pain on many of our places as they push the gags and other snappers out of the way.
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23 Posts
I called and confirmed, they said 8 short now.
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I posted on a few Facebook pages and sent messages to some regulars on the boat. I got two signed up.
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