lake taupo Fishing Report 2024

~~This is the after picture of the port side navigation system. If you notice, the monitor itself is a daylight monitor. The sun is shining directly on it and you can still see the screen. This system has radar, a plotter, and a fathometer. And it's all AIS capable. (Automated identification system) All ships that have AIS, can be tracked on a website, called www.marinetraffic.com. All of the systems can be overlaid so you can have your plotter, radar, and depth viewed at the same time

~~
This is the starboard side navigation system. Which is identical to the port. In addition to the previous mentioned features, the monitor can be switched to a computer system which has Nobel Tech times zero catch navigation fish finding and my favorite, bottom mapping system on it. You can, and we have been, making our own bottom maps for the previous three years. Cool stuff. In addition it has live weather from Weather Works XM Weather. Also it has SeaView Ocean Imaging capabilities to where we can download water temperature, chlorophyll, sea height, ect. The port system also has its own computer.

~~The monitor on the left is a sound activated fathometer for fish finding. And the monitor on the right is a daylight monitor for our sonar, for fish finding. In the front is one of our pairs of Gyroscopic binoculars

~~All of these electronics need new antennas. And this is how they get there. We literally pulled out a third of a dock cart of old wiring

~~Say good bye to the old radars.

~~Drew grinding away on a little cancer on the deck.

~~The roto hammer is one of our favorite tools for chipping up cancerous areas on the deck, but the noise is unbearable to our neighbors in the boat yard.

~~The deck hatches had to be completely stripped

~~We re-skinned the outside of the galley doors. They now have a nice white formica finish.

~~Creative, yes. But I bet he spent a half hour looking for that office chair in the boat yard!

~~The boat looks kinda small in some of these upcoming pictures without Tommie in them for perspective.  ~~Jed's missing from these shots because he was taking the pictures.

~~Drew resealing inspection plates for exhaust

~~Tommie detailing wood work

~~Tommie prepping for paint

~~Final coat of deck paint. Looking good!

July 8
    We started this morning off with a bang.  We were up at 0400 hours and loaded up on mackerel, then we went and found a nice school of 20-25 pound fish that bit for us for a little while.  They were biting the surface iron great and I decided this morning that my favorite kind of fishing is surface iron for big yellows.  Big tuna and wahoo are really cool too but man o man is it fun.  My passenger and bud Dennis wasn't hooking any.  He usually does but he had a straight rod the whole drift.  When it slowed down he noticed that his jig had no hook on it.  Through all the excitement he ever noticed until it was done.  I thought that was kind of funny.  Bummer though.  The bite was rather short lived as was expected and after that we did some scouting.  We found a nice school of those 20-25 pounders but it was tough to get them to bite.   Throughout the rest of the day we did some scouting and caught fish and did some scouting and didn't.  We ended up with about a hundred and we're satisfied.

    We're going to stay the night and try this again in the morning.  I'm thinking about fishing offshore for tuna in the afternoon.  We'll see how tomorrow goes.