1.5 day tuna option
- Thread starter dbaken
- Start date
You might want to see how many anglers per trip. @Phil K, two friends of mine, and I did a combined live bait / fly trip right after Labor Day this past summer. It worked out fine, but you have to be VERY careful that the braided line on the live bait rods doesn't get wrapped around a fly line. According to Nick, that can result in VERY bad outcomes for the fly line. And you know how hard it is to control albacore when they are in a mood...
Steve
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How many fly fishers can fish from that boat at the same time?
From the pics, it looks like 5 people could troll. 2 off each side, 1 off the back. Decent amount of space up front for a bait stop.
Per the website, bunks on board and they provide meals. Starlink for insta, etc. Leave at 11 am. Return between 5-7 pm the next day.
Per the website, bunks on board and they provide meals. Starlink for insta, etc. Leave at 11 am. Return between 5-7 pm the next day.
Does the Pacific Ocean 30 miles offshore typically lay down at night? I would love to do an overnight trip out there, but I am pretty skeptical of having to do it in marginal conditions because I signed up for the date and plunked down a hefty deposit 7 months ago. I also wonder why they don't just leave early in the morning. Packing in back-to-back-to-back trips maybe, and need the time to rest and resupply?
The primary driver of winds that far offshore are storm systems, not "land" and "sea" breezes. Here is a week's worth of data from a buoy off the Columbia bar right at the edge of the continental slope / shelf.
"You pays your money and you take your chances." I am sure that the company has guidelines for cancelling.
Steve
My wedding gift from my wife was a 2 day o/n trip for tuna out of Westport about 22 yrs ago. It was fine re seas. A couple of kids had a hoot at night trying to land sharks that noshed the anchovies they put down. It was great being ready to fish as thx sun cue up. It was all gear but oh lord we caught so much fish. I wasted a lot.
Dave
It's always a roll of the dice booking a trip well in advance. Way back in my teenager days, a few San Diego charter boats would move up to Morro Bay, as they follow the albacore's northward migration along the West Coast. The boats would depart the harbor around 10 pm and returning in the early evening the following day. We trolled until a hook up and then used live bait (always anchovies when I did it). All of this for $35 a trip! Ocean conditions were always a wild card, sometimes it was flat, sometimes lumpy, and occasionally, jackass. I never slept well when the ocean was lumpy at night but it didn't matter as I was young and catching tuna.
As a card carrying weather geek, I've paid close attention to coastal ocean weather for the many years we fished out of Crescent City, Brookings and Coos Bay. Our summer weather is typically dominated by a ridge of high pressure centered over the Eastern Pacific. Coastal waters can be influenced by howling northerlies generated by pressure gradients which are created by the interaction between the offshore ridge and an inland thermal trough. Thermal troughs are areas of low pressure created by hot inland temperatures (originating in the American Southwest). When a trough expands north and west into Oregon, inland temperatures in places like Portland and the Willamette Valley become hot while waters along the coast experience strong north winds (which generate steep wind waves). Cooler night time temperatures will settle these winds at night - sometimes.
As a card carrying weather geek, I've paid close attention to coastal ocean weather for the many years we fished out of Crescent City, Brookings and Coos Bay. Our summer weather is typically dominated by a ridge of high pressure centered over the Eastern Pacific. Coastal waters can be influenced by howling northerlies generated by pressure gradients which are created by the interaction between the offshore ridge and an inland thermal trough. Thermal troughs are areas of low pressure created by hot inland temperatures (originating in the American Southwest). When a trough expands north and west into Oregon, inland temperatures in places like Portland and the Willamette Valley become hot while waters along the coast experience strong north winds (which generate steep wind waves). Cooler night time temperatures will settle these winds at night - sometimes.
$35 party boat fare! Amazing!
That was a month’s worth of lawn mowing wages back then!
SilverFly
Legend
Did an overnight gear trip out of Westport about 10 years ago. Bigger boat, not the most comfortable sleeping conditions, but had to go up on deck at 2AM just to check things out.
Glad I did. Stars were incredible, as was the biomass of baitfish and bioluminescent plankton attracted to the boat lights. I didnt drop a line in, but one of the other guys got up just before dawn and claims he was spooled by "something". He was using fairly hefty gear, so doubtful it was an albacore. Probably a shark, but he was hypothesizing maybe a Bigeye (who am I to question someone else's tuna delusion?
)
The real "one that got away" story was next day when 3 Orcas crashed our best bait stop, with the lead whale eating the tuna on my buddy's line. The sucky part was that I was just reaching for the flyrod the Captain let me bring on board.
I'd be down for another overnighter as a full fly trip. Not sure I can swing it this year but might be worth planning for next.
Glad I did. Stars were incredible, as was the biomass of baitfish and bioluminescent plankton attracted to the boat lights. I didnt drop a line in, but one of the other guys got up just before dawn and claims he was spooled by "something". He was using fairly hefty gear, so doubtful it was an albacore. Probably a shark, but he was hypothesizing maybe a Bigeye (who am I to question someone else's tuna delusion?
)The real "one that got away" story was next day when 3 Orcas crashed our best bait stop, with the lead whale eating the tuna on my buddy's line. The sucky part was that I was just reaching for the flyrod the Captain let me bring on board.
I'd be down for another overnighter as a full fly trip. Not sure I can swing it this year but might be worth planning for next.
"At night" doesn't really matter - the wind blows or stops when the systems move in or move out. Guys go out in sport boats to do overnight on the really calm stretches where you have a few calm days in a row. I've considered doing it and my do it if the opportunity presents itself. I have no issue being out there at night myself.
Hell yeah. It seems like it would be wise to have someone else along, just in case you conk your head and fall overboard or something crazy like that happens.
Can be said for any trip - I mostly always have someone else on the boat because I don't want to pay for all the gas
But as long as you have radar, an overnight is no biggy if the seas are calm. Shut everything down except the radar, set a proximity alarm if you can do that on your radar system, do lookouts every so often to check for vessel lights that may be approaching, and be sure to have a battery isolation switch for your electronics so that you don't risk draining your batteries and can't start the next morning.
Skagittarius
Steelhead
I did an overnight albacore trip on a friends boat in Sept 2021 and it was a great experience. We ended up pretty much 82 miles straight out of Westport in the middle of the commercial fleet. There must have been 20+ boats within a few miles of us. As SilverFly noted the stars were incredible. Resting in my bean bag chair, I recall gazing up at orion thinking I had the perfect view of betelgeuse if it suddenly went super nova (albeit 642.5 years ago). We had big plans to fish overnight but after catching one shark we called it a night a few hours after sundown. Tuna fishing was on fire the next morning though. We awoke to fish around the boat. That's when I'd plan to break out the fly rod.
Sounds amazing!
Skagittarius
Steelhead
Indeed it was. We caught a lot of tuna on that trip, but it got off to a slow start. On the first day we kept going west and eventually found the fish (and fleet) and had great fishing in the afternoon and into the evening. The next day started off with a bang. We quickly hooked a fish that spooled a rod in maybe 2 minutes (bluefin?) and then had a thresher shark on that jumped and broke off.
It was a cold night though! I remember thinking I should have packed my down mountaineering bag.