lower illinois river Fishing Report 2024

123 yellowfin tuna 3 bluefin tuna. Words can’t describe how lucky we are to call the 32 block home. Mother Nature continues to impress.

We spent our last day looking at school after school of albacore. A very good sign of no biting fish. Frustrating? Yes. Oh well. That's just how it goes sometimes. A very good trip in all. Thanks to everyone on board and to the charter master Wayne Martin with Catchy Tackle lures. We'll be rolling back out tomorrow on another 5 day trip. Stay tuned.

Hi Gang

There are now an even 50 of you on this update list plus 8 of our P.R. guys. Hopefully I will have it figured out so I can also send it from the boat starting next Friday when I get back on. It will be a different email address and going through the Sat phone address, so don't send me large files to the boat. Anyways, lets get at it.

Yesterday only one boat remained in the hot area in some pretty crappy weather, and to his credit he kicked the heck out of the bluefin and yellowfin. Equal scores of limits for each. Drew will be there early afternoon. The weather is beautiful again. And as we know these tunas REALLY want to bite when the weather lays down. I'll send you out an update when I talk to him this afternoon. Hope you're having a fun Sunday.

Tommy

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2013

Hi friends. Well, the morning started out pretty well for us. Got an early wake up from Riddler after an all night freeze in our crew staterooms. The new A/C works too well. We all slept in socks and sweaters and were still freezing. We felt like Sinka in "Cool Runnings" when John Candy throws him in the ice cream truck to simulate what the temperature would be like for their bobsled race. Anyhow, with The Outfields "Use Your Love" stuck in my head, we started hooking some bluefin tunas in the 50 lb. range, give or take a few pounds, and we managed to boat six of those beauties. A good start to our morning but that was it for our day on the BFT. Nice to see 'em, but not a whole lot of substance to it, so we continued on our journey south.

Throughout the day, we stopped on multiple kelp paddies for a few handfuls of quality 14-25 lb. yellows and we even snagged a few 18 lb. yellowfin tuna as well, so that was sweet. We didn't have a banner day by any means but we scratched a decent day out of it and everyone had a shot at a quality offshore gamefish. With that, we didn't see a whole lot to keep us offshore so we'll be heading elsewhere to try and locate some sabas (greenback mackerel) and some yellowtail as well. We'll be in the zone around 23:45 hours and the passengers are downstairs enjoying barbecue ribs, corn, and cherry pie.

Just a quick bit of news before I sign off: fishing in the day and a half range picked up late in the day on bluefin tuna. Good scores for the guys and granted we're further south than those guys, we're keeping our eyes on that developing situation. Be sure to check our schedule as we have a couple of day and a half trips on the schedule.

So that is all. Weather is chilly but the sea state is plenty fine. We'll be at it here in a few hours so we better get some sleep. Take care.

Captain Ryan Bostian called in tonight with an update from the San Diego out of Seaforth Sportfishing in Mission Bay, CA. Today we had very good fishing for Yellowtail at the Coronado Islands. We group ended up with 61 Yellowtail and 10 Barracuda. We did have 4 small Yellowtail that we released. So we had a total of 65 Yellowtail today.

The Yellowtail were biting on surface iron, fly-lined baits, and yo-yo jigs. Today we had 6 or 7 good shots at the fish.

22 yellowtail 2 dorado. Unable to find a lucky kelp or a school today.

Traveling today in great weather. Lunch is sweet and sour pork with Hawaiian fried rice. Dinner is shrimp Diablo. You're not getting the breakfast report because I usually skip breakfast. We will be fishing again tomorrow morning. Come on cows!

We traveled all day in excellent weather. We just rigged, rigged, rigged and ate, ate, ate. We are excited to get to where we are going. Check in tomorrow for our report. Thanks, Tommy and crew