The original plan was a meet up at the "public ma tau" between the Aberdeen Boat Club and the Aberdeen Marine Police station at 07:15 for a swift departure. Instead, a couple of guys were running late and we ended up with a 07:45 departure into slightly stronger than forecast winds and a 2-3 foot chop with occasional larger seas. Having come by passenger ferry from Discovery Bay, I was a little surprised as the waters south of Lama Island and Hong Kong harbor were nice and calm.I was expecting a day with water about as flat as we saw in the harbor that morning.
Once we began running offshore I got a second shower in the salt water with a little spray making it to the flybridge once in a while. But, the temperature was already around 29c (or 84 in man degrees) making the bits of spray not unwelcome. We were running out at a leisurely 17.5 to 18 knots as there was no rush to get into a tide as we didn't really have much of a tide movement forecast for the day.
After having run 45 miles two weeks ago to find blue water it was pleasant to find the change about midway in the ship channel leaving Hong Kong with Po Toi Island barely 4 kilometers behind us.
We caught up to Kim Stuart and his crew on Kiduzi about 8:10 and watched him run around the mid channel marker twice while guys slowly made it out of the salon and into the cockpit to start running the rods out that I had put in place and rigged with lures earlier. We then took a couple of swings around and boated 2 tiny tuna (one of which was extremely green and looked like a mackerel from the flybridge) and 1 tiny mahi mahi. First fish was over the side at 08:30.
These guppies prompted us to leave that buoy and head out to look for trash/weed lines and signs of life.As we were bringing the lines in two container ships passed in front of us about half a kilometer away. I got in behind one to run in his flattened out wake for 20 minutes or so and then left him to run a little more southerly. We saw Kim stop to fish around a stopped fishing boat and that was the last we saw of him until pulling into Aberdeen at 17:30 later.
After seeing a couple of flying fish and a larger containership at anchor we put the lines back in to begin fishing again. We trolled the ship's starboard side with zero results and got almost the entire length of the port side before a small mahi mahi came out from under the bow to get hung and end up being thrown back in. We then trolled down the starboard side again with nothing doing so started off away from the ship.
At around 500 meters away two rods went off and we caught 2 more small kawa kawa tuna. This was the beginning of a day that saw fish continuously, often in double and triples hookups, averaging 1 or 2 fish on every 30 minutes.
From there we trolled slightly west of due south and headed for the near wreck which is about 9 miles south south-east of the north east tip of Lema Island.
After making a couple of large circles in the area of that wreck we headed on a little bit south south-west parallel to Lema Island leaving a couple of darkening storm cells in our wake.
That path was very productive as we had several more tuna, the largest mahi mahi of the day and three wahoo during that run.
I had taken a break from the flybridge to adjust the spread and was going around the rods bringing the lures in a little closer and putting rubber bands around the lines attached to the reel handles to keep our rigs running right and tangle free. The port corner had just been reset when it went off in front of me in a serious scream.
I thought the excessively loud sounding drag was because it had been adjusted light and so cranked down on the lever just a bit. That was when the wahoo knew I was there and started to give a bit of a fight. It was only maximum 12 pounds however and it was in the boat in just a few minutes
We put the lure back into the pattern and continued the troll. It probably was not 2 minutes afterward that 2 more rods were singing. This time Van Sternbergh and Greg Mclaughlin were on the rods to bring in 2 more wahoo between 10-11 pounds.
Again, we put those rigs back in the pattern and quickly set off on the troll again when another wahoo came straight out of the water with a lure in it's mouth. Unfortunately it wasn't hooked and that one took off.
We started the boat forward again and Jeff Fisher was in front of the short corner rod on the staroard side where a nice mahi mahi had taken a red and white islander.
Unfortunately that fish was freed when the net and the fish made
contact creating just enough slack for the hook to fall from the fish's mouth. That mahi mahi would have been the largest one of the day as it was around 30 inches and was probably 8-10 pounds. It was Ingvar's second week in a row to execute a "release" on the day's biggest mahi mahi!
From there we took an offshore route to avoid a nasty downpour that had been chasing us. Before heading off I entered a waypoint in the GPS so that we could return to fish that area. Once the storm passed we returned only to find that the wahoo were no longer in that piece of ocean. We trolled the area for another 2 hours or so before beginning the troll toward home. Again, we were picking up a fish or 2 every half of an hour or so.
The water was a gorgeous, deep blue all day, as seen in this picture with Ingvar's feet; he captioned this with one of his favorite sayings: "it doesn't hurt anywhere now."
We picked up the last fish on the north eastern tip of Lema just before entering the ship channel as we trolled back toward Hong Kong. On the day we had more than 30 strikes, boated over 20 fish and kept 6. I saw 3 types of tuna on Saturday: kawa kawa, skipjack and bluefin. Along wih the wahoo and mahi mahi it was a great day with plenty of action and variety.
