dale hollow lake Fishing Report 2024

Nov. 15

                Not much to report from us today.  It was a pretty uneventful day.  We traveled all morning until after lunch when we arrived to the Islands, and we never saw a yellowtail.  It was dead as can be at this place.  We took the tour, well as much as we could in a few hours, and ended up back here in the lee.  We were and still are catching calico bass and things.  We did hook something big, a yellow or a big halibut or even a seabass, but we'll never know because the hook straightened out right before we could see it and the fish got away.  And that's it.  We're going to try and keep our anchor hung right here and see what kind of conditions we have here in the morning for our last day of fishing.  As soon as the wind backs off enough for a tolerable ride offshore Tuesday morning, we'll be on our way home.

Looked at an incredible amount of 30-60 lb bluefin and managed to land 4. One cooperative school of 20-30 lb yellowfin where we landed 46. A few random skipjack and perfect weather.

38 Yellowfin, 117 Yellowtail, 4 Dorado and 18 Skipjack. A fine November day.

32 large bonito today. Weather is keeping us tied to the dock for a few days. Next available trip is Friday. Make those reservations.

Nov. 6

Well today wasn't at all what we expected. Last week it had been great yellowtail fishing in the zone we were in but for whatever reason most that fish wasn't around today. Famous words of Steve Loomis, "only one things for sure and that's that things will change". So true in life but especially true in fishing. Things will always change whether it be for better or for worse. Unfortunately today it was for worse. That's why you can't base your booking a trip on last year or even 2 weeks ago. Oh well. We caught a few nice yellows today and lots of other species we saved for meals later on in the trip because they'll be tasty. We're now heading south. We're going to start fishing first thing tomorrow fishing for D, all of the above.

Passenger Mike Payne brought a whole bunch of crab with him. I'm not sure exactly what kind of crab they were. They weren't king crab but the next best thing. Basically it was all you can eat because when I had all I could take down there was a lot of it still available. Delicious. Talk to you tomorrow.

Drew

~~Oct. 13-14
 Nothing to report on Oct. 13.  More of the same.  Though it was our last day so the cocktail hour was to a minimum.  We arrived to our destination around 1:30 in the am Tuesday morning.  We did a tour for flying fish (to use as bait) but we only caught a few.  We kicked the anchor over and most of us got a couple more hours of sleep.  Everyone got up at 0400 hours and got to work.  Some faster than others.  When I woke up George was the only one in the water so I thought I'd give him a hand.  I threw a sinker on a rig and dropped down a sardine and 5 minutes later we had our first tuna aboard.  About an 80 pounder.  It was our sashimi fish.  After that there was a whole lot of good shark and small tuna fishing going down so again during a time when no one was in the water (due to having to retie because of shark teeth), I dropped another bait down, this time on the rod Mark likes to call the OJ (no one knows why), and about 20-30 minutes later we had a 196 pounder aboard.  While that was going on George got hooked up and brought a 218 pounder over the rail.  It wasn't even light out yet.  After that the sharks fully took over.  It was pretty much unfishable so we didn't give it much time, we pulled anchor and got to trolling and for the next 8 hours or so it was steady striking on the wahoos.  Damn.  We caught about 5 per angler so I'd call that good for sure.  For the last few hours we got steady strikes on one of this groups favorite fishing methods, trolling the yummy fliers.  We caught a lot of tuna today on those and on the marauders and some on bait.  They were all mostly in the 120 pound range.

 The weather today sure was interesting.  The wind never had much strength but it couldn't pick a direction.  One minute it was coming out of the northeast, and the next it was coming out of the west.  It did that all day so for that and the sharkies giving us grief we never tried another anchor job today and we're spending the night adrift.  It also rained a whole lot this evening.  I'd say it was raining cats and dogs when I went to bed but it's cleared up now at 0100 hour as I write this on my watch.  One more hour and I'm going back to bed until 5 when we'll all be going back into battle.  Hopefully tomorrow these dang sharks leave us alone.