SoCalSalty – Trip Report: 976-Tuna / Seeker Rods Eclipse 2 Day (Day 2)

Day 2 Dawn

We had enjoyed sunny skies and calm seas for the most part during Day One. Day Two proved to be a little more bumpy. It’s always rougher coming back up the line than going down. Captain Rich might have been pushing it too to make sure we could get a morning bite in. Over the course of Day One, we left all the bait in the forward tanks alone. The question now was how it fared in the ride over.

As the sun rose over the ocean, the good news was that the bait looked pretty good. More survived than Capt. Rich anticipated. The individual baits were in good shape too…still pretty lively…not all red noses. The bad news was we were going to have a hard time finding a kelp under these conditions. It seemed like the whole fleet was in the 70 mile zone we were in. Apparently, the commercial pens are no longer in that 50 mile area. Despite the rough conditions, the water was clean and about 71 degrees…definitely fishy. When you are chasing these pelagic species though, one boat could be limiting out, and another could be skunked. We were going to need some luck.

Nice bull dodo

It took awhile, but we found a kelp. It yielded some dorado and some small yellows. The fish were a little nicer quality than the dodo and yellowtail we encountered the previous day, so we fished it for awhile.

We moved on and hit a long lull. At this range we were going to need to start heading out around 1pm. By 11 it was beginning to look kind of dire. We kept looking though and finally we found another kelp. When we initially started our drift, we were picking up yellows and dodo. As we continued drifting further out though, we picked up yellowfin and our first bluefin! It got good, we ended up drifting the same kelp 3 times and had the best action of the trip. We only left because we had to. We were lucky we had the bait to take advantage of it. Final count was 11 Bluefin Tuna 125 Yellowfin Tuna 50 Yellowtail 26 Dorado for the 28 of us.

On our way back, one of the anglers, Eli, donated one of his tuna. Our cook, Will, went to work and served us a beautiful sashimi platter of the freshest ahi tuna you can ever get. Wow. What a great way to end the trip. Thanks to Captain Rich, and the crew of the Eclipse for a great trip. Tight lines!