hilton head Fishing Report 2025

POLARIS SUPREME TRIP REPORT 09-23-2020 We departed today on Joe Becks annual 8 day trip.The weather is great and our bait stinks. lots of spinners. hopefully enough will cure out to make the trip. Not much to report the usual rigging eating and napping. The picture is of our new storage box an rod holders we built in the bow to replace the old bait tank. We will be traveling all day tomorrow. The Polaris Supreme Crew!

Nov. 11

After our previous day of wide open fishing - we had high hopes of the same on giant yellow fin tuna. The day started with Captain Tommy identifying sonar readings of big schools of tuna all around us. We fished hard all day. Kites, sinker rigs, fly line, chunked, jigged, drifted and anchored. Tommy calling out the sonar readings the whole time, ", "big tuna at 20 fathoms" or "we are surrounded by school tuna 10 fathoms to 30 fathoms". We began to doubt Tommy's sonar and guessed that it was just a screen saver image. Then, in the late afternoon, tuna started flying out of the water all around us for a 1/4 mile. 100 lb to 300 lb tuna fully coming out of water and giving us a show and taunting us once more. At the end of the day Greg, Matt and Rick caught larger tuna and kept us from getting skunked. We flushed the stomachs of the tuna and found them stuffed with pelagic crabs. The sardines, mackerel and flying fish we offered were not on their menu. We hear of a place up the line where the yellow tail are biting. We are going there now.

OTR Lon Mikkelsen.

Hi Anglers,

The Polaris Supreme is out on a 1 1/2 day trip. ( 9/27) I spoke with Drew at 2:30 and he had just had a kelp for limits of yellowfin and dorado and is now looking for bluefin. Weather is great and he will be posting an end of the day report on the web-site.

Thanks,

Tommy

Suggested tackle for 7:00-4:00 local 3/4 day trips. (1) A 25 or 30 lb. outfit to fish fly line sardines , sliding egg sinker and squid and a lead head and squid. This outfit can also double as a light dropper loop rod for shallow water rockfish. (2) A 40 or 50 lb. outfit. This will be a heavy dropper loop rod for targeting yellowtail , white sea bass and halibut down on the bottom. (3) A deep water rock cod outfit. A 20 size reel filled up with 65 lb. spectra and a 7 ft. rod stiff enough to handle a 16 oz. sinker. If you only want to bring one rod a 30 lb. outfit would be your best bet. TERMINAL TACKLE (Hooks) a pack of size 2 live bait hooks for fishing anchovies and small squid strips. A pack of size 2/0 live bait hooks for fishing live sardines and live squid on an egg sinker. A pack of size 4/0 live bait hooks for fishing live squid on your heavy dropper loop rod. A few long shank rock cod hooks may be usefull but not mandatory on the days we fish deep. (Sinkers) an assortment of sliding egg sinkers from 1/8-1 oz. an assortment of torpedo sinkers from 2-16 oz. Sinker size will be determined by depth of water and strength of current. (Lead heads ) An assortment of "banana" shaped lead heads from 1/2 - 2 oz.

Absolutely a great day of fishing. From day light on we had excellent fishing on school grade yellowtail. Our weather is good and everyone is having a great time. We are off to look for tuna tomorrow. We celebrated with Alex Zarifis as he turned 80 today! Great way to spend your birthday. Thanks for checking in. Tommy and crew

Aug 13
 Oh how quick game plans can change out here.  Hello all and welcome back.  Or welcome me back.  Or... What was the question?  Never mind.  I'm back.  I had a wonderful trip off.  Spent a lot of time with my daughter.  She got much cuter in the last month and also became much more of a terror.  All joy though.

 When we left the dock this afternoon I felt pretty good about my game plan.  Go fish yellows for a day or two, then come catch tuna for the last couple of days.  We caught over a hundred tuna today on our departure day.  Good ones too.  20-40 pounders minus one 20 fish stop on small yellowfin.  Well that just threw a wrench in my whole plans.  I'm not whining though.  We're very grateful for what we caught today.  Not every boat in this ocean caught fish today.  So we're going to take it one day at a time now.  Hopefully we can do this again tomorrow.
      

Captain Matt and the boys burning the midnight oil for twenty 35-50 lb bluefin and 1 yellowfin. Put the J hooks away and exchange them for circles when Mr. Bluefin is around.

We spent the morning finishing rigging up everyone's gear for tomorrow. We arrived the days fishing grounds just after lunch and spent a little time looking around before finding a little nest of wahoo. We caught a handful and lost that many right away and thought "this is alright". That was the last of the wahoo we saw. All the small yellowtail you could ever want but that's not what we were in search of so we are now sliding down to be in the tuna grounds tomorrow. Wish us luck please.