Carmine's trip report August 6th-7th

HK fishermen:

Onboard the "Thai Lady"
Andy Bright
Carmine Vastola

Departed cwb: 12 noon 08/06
Returned cwb: 7pm 08/07

With mine and Dr Bright' schedules matching a 2 night trip was in order. We
departed into moderate conditions, with clear skies and bright sun... the
ride offshore was uneventful our plan was to fish the first rig for the
night and then troll to a group of 90 miles rigs for our Saturday night tie
off.

As we were going to run out of day
we trolled in the last 10 miles to the
first rig with a few nice skip jack boated.
Once we were tied off, which
turned out to be challenging,
Dr Bright tried to jig up some bait, the
"Tall Guy" was out of squid so we were
bait less for a 2 night trip. On the first
drop bang fish on. After a short fight
a chicken grunt came over the side.

Unfortunately this was the first and only strike on the bait catching front.

At about 9:30pm one of the work boats decided he did not want us on the rig
and proceeded to force us to leave. This particular work boat seems to have
a complex as he is the only one to act so poorly. We took his hints and
moved on 16 miles to the next rig.

We got hooked up to the next rig with little
difficulty and were back to fishing.   We
had little success on this rig with only 2
kawa kawa boated.

The morning brought 2 "big boats" arriving
at about 7am. There is always a first for
everything, both of the big boat captains went
out of their way to call over to us saying "DIE FUNG" or big wind.... After some broken
Cantonese discussion we realized the forces has change and force 6 winds were now
being called for.

After some discussion we made the call to
work the area and start to troll home by this
time the wave heights had already started to
build and it was obvious it would be an
unfriendly night to stay out.

We worked 2 more rigs with lots of spray
covering the boat with the now 5-8
foots seas causing the 2 man crew to be very careful when we got a strike.

The yellow fin are sure at the rigs we ended up
boating 3 between 10 and 15lbs.  On one pass
all 5 rods went down, we ended up boating 2 fish.

One other point to note is the tanker in the second
group of rigs is no longer there. Strange as it has
been there for the entire 5 years we have been
working the area. Hopefully it comes back as we
pulled many nice fish from under her.

Next shot is this coming weekend, drop me a note if you are interested.