Sorry for the late report.
I drove down to Hatteras thursday night to fish on the Bite Me, a 51' BC SportFisher, with Capt Jay.
First off the boat and crew were awesome. We were there for a jigging exploration trip and told the capt we did not care about keeping fish as long as we got to test out jigging gear on them big tunas. He was fine with that and off we went.
The ride out of the inlet was treacherous...got tossed around the cabin a bit but once we got out it was very nice with some large rollers. Once we got to the fishing grounds, the Capt marked off fish and called out the depths.
On the first drift we had 4 hookups out of 5. Most of were lost in seconds, but I managed to hook mine well and the fight was on. I had a 6' custom Gloomis rated for 80lb and a Daiwa Saltiga 40 with 90lb braid and 100lb top shot. The reel had a drag upgrade to carbontex and had about 26-28lb of drag.
I managed to gain some line, but when the fish waned to run, I could not put the stop on him. He took more that 200yds the first run and I put that back on the reel only to have him run again taking more line. This lasted for over twenty min and I was beat. A buddy took over and fought it for another 10-15min before I took over again. Sad to say aftrer another few minutes of loosing line, the braid broke off right above my knot.
Cast out again and boom, another solid hit. I set the hook and the fight is on again. This one was hooked in less that 60' feet of water and I could see that he was not sounding but rather running to our port side. I managed to gain line and got him close to the boat, but when he saw the baot, he dove and there was no stopping him. I lost 2/3 of my spool in seconds. Managed to give and take line for awhile before I got beat again. My buddy took over and he couldn't gain any line. At that point(thirty min into the fight) the line snapped again.
I have to wonder about the line rating of the YGB(japanese) metered braid.
After that we had a few more hits and hookups but nothing lasting more than a few seconds.
Buddies that came down with us fished on another boat(GodSpeeed) and had a great day too. They managed to keep one and bring a two others to the boat side. They had alot more hook ups than we did.
One of the guys on that boat burnt his Shimano OceaJIgga(japanese version of the Trinidad), he says the fish spooled him in seconds and the Capt smelled the smoke and thought he had an electrical fire on the boat.
We went down expecting fish in the 100 -150lb calss, but what we found there were fish in the 150-200lb calss and we were way under gunned.
Me getting my arse kicked by the first fish...
Young getting his ass kicked by my first fish..
rest of our team on the GodSpeed.
Jeff on the GodSpeed with the tuna they killed, it was caught on a Saltiga 50 with carbontex drags. He said he almost got spooled twice.
Here's Ryan while his fish destroys his Shimano 4000p.
Fish like this were everywhere. Trollers did very well that day too.
Hopefully these fish will move into CapeMay by early June...the Capts down in Hatteras were all very pleasntly surprised with the size and quantity of the fish they were getting this year. Lets hope it continues up here.
doh...forgot to mention, we used hammered diamond jigs from 7oz to 10oz. A few of the guys were trying butterfly jigs but they had little to no hits. I found that that day the fish wanted something moving slow and almost always hit as the jig was falling.
