Offshore Venice La

Finally got through all the bad weather down here to make it offshore again. I had an overnighter on the contender and a daytrip. They were both quite productive. I had Tim Hanus and his friends on the boat on sat night. We left out around 9 am to head to the floaters with the hope to finish up early enough to go swordfishing. The bite was slow at first though. Although we were steadily picking up blackfin and undersized yellowfin on williamson jigs we werent getting any legal fish. In the three hours we put in at this rig we caught two 35 pound yellowfin on live bait. I decided to move south a drillship and thats where we hit paydirt. Between 415 and 530 we caught another 10 yellowfin on chum and at one point 8 straight chunkbaits in teh water hooked up on yellowfin. We were using all frenzy 7/0 circle hooks and frenzy 80 pound flourocarbon, I liked it better then a lot of bigger brands I have used.

At dark the bite slowed here so we moved to another rig. In the next hour here we picked up another 6 yellows before we headed to the house with a full 6 man llimit of 18 yellowfin. We headed in and made a couple drifts for swords with one hit and miss.

On monday I had a day trip with Pat Bourque who now lives in Malaysia and all his old friends from Slidell. We headed back out to the drillship and made bait pretty easy with our frenzy sabiki rigs. We put the first two out and had two 100 pound plus yellows on before we even got the baits set. One broke off on his first run but the 2nd stayed on. It was a three man fight on this fish before we put him in a little over an hour after hooking him. It was a solid 130 pound class fish. We went back over to the spot and started picking away at the fish. Around 130 we had put 6-7 yellows in the boat. We made the decision to see what chum would do and in the next hour we added 7-8 more fish to the box to end up with 14 yellowfin on the day. Two of which were over 100 pounds. We caught all these fish on frenzy hooks and flouro as well.