April 2, 2012 – Scott Scores Big Time Fishing Kona!

Scott, a commercial fisherman from Alaska chartered the Lepika for a full day.  A few years ago he fished Kona on a different boat without success so the pressure was on to get him something.  He had also been following my blogs for the last several months so the pressure was REALLY on!  I decided to head south today because the current was right and the fishing up north had slowed.  We worked out way down and found a nice porpoise school.  There were about 8 boats fishing the school and I made a pass with my sounder on but didn’t mark any fish.  I made a few more passes just to make sure and again, no fish were swimming with the porpoise.  I decided to go back to trolling and pointed the Lepika away from the school.  I set up the pattern and went upstairs to put the last lure out.  I pushed the drag up on the Fin-Nor 80 and as I turned back to the helm Scott yeld out, “FISH!”  I whipped around and watched as a big blue marlin piled on the lure I had just set!  Line went screaming off the reel….FAST!  Scott got in the chair and we watched as a big blue marlin tailwalked across the surface and headed straight for the horizon.  By the time I cleared the 2nd line out of the water Scott was into the backing which means he had at least 500yards of line out.  I started backing down hard on the fish and we slowly gained line back on the reel.  Scott did a great job keeping good pressure on the fish.  After a 25 minute fight we finally got the fish to leader for a clean release.  I estimated his blue at 350lbs!  We again set the pattern back out and headed out to the deep.  About an hour later we were on the bridge talking when we spotted a small log floating on the water straight ahead of us.  Usually mahimahi will hang around floating debri but this log was so small I really didn’t think anything would come of it.  As I made a pass two nice mahimahi came charging in and ate the stinger and long rigger lures.  Scott fought one of the mahimahi and I fought the other.  I cleared a few lines and as I reeled them in more mahimahi charged in trying to eat the lures right in the wash!  The water was literally neon blue with mahimahi.  There were easily a hundred mahimahi around this tiny log floating in the middle of the ocean!  We got to work and switched over to some lighter tackle.  In the next 2 hours we would catch 20 mahimahi to 27lbs!  We probably could have caught more but we eventually lost track of the log.  We were both pretty wore anyway out after all that action!