Trip Day: 11-12-10
Trip Length: 2 Day
Boat: Pacific Star
Landing: Pierpoint Landing
Cost: $250 including meals. Drinks, fish cleaning, crew tip extra.
Crew:
Captain: Mike Bullard
Second Captain: Dak ??
Galley: Tommy
Deckhands: Jeff and David
Saw the opportunity to fish on a 2 day trip so I jumped at the chance to go for it and again to fish with George and the Senor Tuna crew again. Left the office at 4pm on Friday and got to the landing just a little before 6pm and was able to score a parking spot in the main lot. Even better was when I went to the landing office to pay for an overnight permit I was informed that a movie crew was filming and had paid for the entire lot and my permit was free this time. Woo Hoo free parking, thank you movie company.
10pm rolls around and all 26 of us are loaded on board and we are off. As we head out of the harbor Captian Mike brings everyone into the Galley and gives us the safety speech and rundown of what's going to happen. We were not going to have any finbait on this trip but we had plenty of fresh frozen squid and we were going to head out a few miles from the harbor and see if we can make some live squid also. The weather was looking great for the next 2 day's so the game plan would be to try and make squid and then head over out for rockfishing and maybe some halibut drifts also. Day 2 depending on how things paned out we could target some white sea bass or yellowtail.
About 2 miles out of the harbor we put the squid light's out and withing 5 mins the squid start floating up and next thing you know there's squid everywhere. By far the largest squid float I've ever seen so far. We wound up filling all the tanks with squid, almost 100 scoops of live squid. There would be no “go easy on the squid” on this trip. With the bait tanks filled we pointed the boat offshore.
Day 1
At approximately 6am a few of us start fishing while the rest are getting up and getting ready. Nothing wide open but with no current going it makes for a slow but steady morning of rockfish. Breakfast is served and we have french toast with eggs.
As the morning continues on with little wind we move from one spot to the next slowly and steadly picking off at the rockfish. Some really nice big reds, chuckle's, and a few other misc rockfish would be coming over the rail.
Lunch would be served, meatloaf with mashed potatoes and oven roasted carrots. YUM.
As the wind picked up a bit in the afternoon we started picking away at the rockfish much better and even a few lings would finally bite and get landed.
Towards the end of the day pretty much everyone had limit's or near limit's of rockfish and that's when Captain Mike decided to call it a day . We anchored in for the night and in the morning see if we can try for some halibut.
Dinner is served once we get anchored up and while dinner is going the crew get's about and starts cleaning the day's catch.
A beautiful collection of Shimano's new Waxwing jigs. Too bad they never got used.
Dinner would be Caesar salad with roasted chicken breast on rice with veggies and to top that off fresh brownies and vanilla ice cream for dessert. With a great meal like that most of use turned in after dinner to get ready for the next day while a few other's decided to see if they could get some sort of night bite going but all they would wind up catching would be baby seals or bat ray's. A few would lounge in the galley watching a few movies and we even had a friendly poker game going on.
Day 2
Morning rolls around and we start fishing at grey light but with no current going on makes it for tough fishing and there are no biters. Breakfast is served, huevos rancheros is served and we are off to look for better conditions.
With no wind or current going we motor to see if we can bag a few more ling cods and hopefully a little later we would see some current. A few spots here and there and we'd get a few more reds, groupers, chuckles and soon enough some lings would want to come out and play.
Mid morning comes around and Captain Mike decides to make the 2 hr run over to Santa Barbara Island and hope that there will be some current and wind and if so dump a bunch of squid in the water and see if any homeguard yellowtail would want to come out and play. While we are heading over to SBI, lunch is served, cheeseburgers with oven baked seasoned steak fries.
We arrive at SBI and same story, no current and wind. With time running out we give it a shot but unfortunately there are no biters. We finally call it quits and we start our journey back to the landing. A late afternoon snack of eggrolls is served which is a nice sight to see and we finally hit the docks around 8pm and our fantastic trip has come to an end. We've had beautiful weather the entire weekend, sunny, and little to no clouds in the sky, and the ocean was like glass, couldn't ask for a better weekend of fishing.
It's never safe to fall asleep in the galley...
Kenji caught redhanded with the eggrolls....
He did it....No, he did it...
You'll never know what you'll catch on a Senor Tuna trip....
Cudo's goes out to George and the Senor Tuna family for a great trip and also to Captain Mike and his crew of the Pacific Star. They took great care of us, got us out of many tangles and were there whenever we needed any help.
