cherokee lake Fishing Report 2025

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.
                                    

 

Tax evasion. Today had a slow start but really heated up after noon. It was more of the same when it came to the sharks, but the second half of the day we really got on these fish when we had the opportunity. Pulling hard the whole time and bringing in some nice fish through the sharks. Here we have Aiden with a great Tuna he was able to pull away from the tax man! (aka Shark) Way to get on him Aiden!

Caught a few nice Bluefin right as our time expired. 

~~Sept. 2
 We hit the yellowtail grounds today. Not until 9:30. I started looking at 0400 but we weren't there until 9:30. "There" is where we had some good tailing. There's not a whole lot to write about it. We were there, and they were hitting. Most everyone was dropping jigs down and winding them back fast to achieve there tails. Before lunch I was considering fishing yellowtails tomorrow morning before traveling all day to put us in position for tuna the following day, but when I went in to eat lunch, there were 10 fish in the box. The crew dropped them, when I came back out there were 3 in the box and everyone was leaning against the rail not fishing except 3 passengers and 1 of those had 1 hanging. I got the hint. They caught enough yellowtail and they want tuna now. So we'll be traveling all day tomorrow to put ourselves in position to fish bluefin the following day weather pending.

 The weather today was windy, but the further north we get now the less wind there is. It's a nice ride now.

Aug. 21
    Judging by how our trip has been so far, if you would have told me we would have 6 bluefin as of 1:00 this afternoon I wouldn't have believed you.  But sure enough, those darn bluefins were laughing at us.  We saw plenty of them but they didn't give two you know whats about us.  Our buddy Brian on the Spirit Of Adventure called us and told us he was seeing the 30-50 pound grade around where he was so we took a little ride down there.  It wasn't really biting that well until we got there.  Again our timing is on.  For the next few hours it was game on.  It actually took a while to get them to bite but during the best of it I couldn't get the balloon rigs out fast enough.  They were snapping!!  We ended up with a couple rounds of the 30-50 pounders with one going around 90 pounds and we also got a handful of 30-35 pound yellowfin there as well.  

    After it dried up we went looking for another.  We found several schools but none that would hang around and bite our baits.  Around 6:30 we bumped into another school that stuck and we picked up 21 more of those beauts.  And now we drift and do it again tomorrow.  

    The chefs are getting better and better at there sushi spread.  This afternoon it was terrific and I'm pretty sure I heard it's veal chops for dinner tonight.  Sweet dreams.
                                

 

Captain Mike Pritchard called in at grey light from the Tribute out of Seaforth Sportfishing in Mission Bay, CA. We caught 2 Bluefin Tuna at grey light. We have one fish hanging. We caught both the fish on the flat fall. The Tribute has overnight trips departing daily at 10 PM. Call Seaforth at (619) 224-3383 or BOOK ONLINE.
Please note that this photo is from April 3rd.

Polaris Supreme Trip Update 09-29-2019 This nice grade tuna (20 to 40 pounds) is really giving us a hard time. We must've made over a dozen anchor jobs today following that around. Finally just before dark it wanted to settle in and bite good. We were keeping 10 going at a time for a while. It was all that nice quality with no skipjack! We landed a few yellowtail today and of course skipjack and small tuna everywhere we went. The weather did the same thing! I'm calling it the Camelot affect windy crappy weather at night and it gets nice starting in the morning and then starts all over with the nasty weather at night. Will be here again tomorrow and try this one last day before we have to head up the line. The Polaris Supreme Crew

Our biggest one yet tapped out to 353 pounds ! Thank you @g_fly_premium_flying_fish for the bait, congratulations on the fish of a lifetime @tunajugend !