craig montana Fishing Report 2024

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

Hi friends. Today, our good friend and long time Polaris Supreme regular Paul Briscoe told me that my reports were starting sound like Tim's on the Royal Star. First off, I personally enjoy the hell out of reading Tim's reports. That guy is good, real good. Anyhow, today's report will be for Paul so that the people at home can know exactly how our fishing day -- and only our fishing day -- was and no other words. Here it goes.

We woke up this morning, did a seminar. Midway through the seminar, Drew literally ran over a school of yellowfin tuna, dorado, and yellowtail and we began fishing. It was aquarium-style fishing on football yellowfins with a handful of thirty pounders thrown in there too. After that, we drove around all day getting occasional stops on those thirty to fifty pound yellowfin tuna. We ended our day 32 of those beautiful yellowfin, a bunch of footballs, and some flatheads thrown in for color. The weather was flat calm and the bronzing was delicious. We'll be here tomorrow trying for more fat yellowfin and we'll hopefully be the lucky boat to drift on 80-130 lb. bluefin like one boat did today. Maybe I'll tell some stories tomorrow, like how I jumped in the water to save Eric Kinnicutt's fish from being all wrapped up in the propellers and rudders. It was fun. See you later.

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

Hi friends. Flat calm weather, sunshine, and Yellowfin tuna was on our wish-list today and our wishes were granted. It took the fish a little while to wake up this morning but when they showed their faces, we located them and introduced ourselves. We caught fish all sorts of ways today; jumpers, puddlers, breezers, jig strikes, meter marks, sonar marks, and the fishiest birds of all, Tern birds, were helping us locate schools today. We never had a really great stop but we pieced together a lot of good stops and we ended up with a fine catch for our anglers. Throw in some Bluefin and a few nice Dorado for color and you have the recipe for a fantastic day on the water. I honestly feel that with a little less boat pressure, the schools would've been more bountiful but it's hard to find much more to complain about today other than that. Everybody had a shot at a good school and we feel fortunate to be in the zone when they did pop up. It was easy to see them pop up from just about anywhere with the weather we had today. Jock straps and sun visor weather for sure.

So that's all. We're headed up the line and wish to arrive sometime around 0900 hours in the morning. We'll see what kind of speed we make rolling up. Our next report will come to you on Thursday evening as we depart on a 1.5 day trip. Take care.

-Team Supreme-

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Good evening folks. We arrived this morning at 0800 hours, unloaded our fish and guests, and departed the docks @ 1300 hours to embark on our 2-day trip. Our bait looks OK, plenty good enough for some offshore fish to accept our offerings. The reports from the area are different. As of 1830, the boats were just now starting to get some jig strikes and see more sign of fish. Nonetheless, we'll be there first thing tomorrow morning to give it a full day and see what we can come up with. The weather here and for most of the coast is absolutely gorgeous, so we like that a lot. We also like that the forecast calls for more of the same. We're hoping the weatherman is correct and the fish pop up here for us tomorrow. Wish us luck and have a great day.

-Team Supreme-

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

Hi friends. Tough day for us down here in the magical kelp paddy zone. The weather gave us fits all day but we did manage to scratch a day together. The weather was workable but not favorable with 18 knots of wind and a short, medium-sized wind chop. I had trouble going any kind of northerly or westerly direction most of the day for fear of soaking our mast-man.

Even with the weather, we managed to catch 60 yellowfin tuna, 19 yellowtail, 17 dorado, and some skipjack off of a few jig strikes and multiple kelp paddies. We saw good water structure and found plenty of beautiful kelps but all we found were either scraps from other boats or the fish we did see, were just reluctant to latch on to our hooks. All in all, I'm happy with our day and I feel that we were right on par for the boats in the area. Guys have been fishing the same kelps for days and days --either in the local zone or this lower zone-- so I felt the need to get on something fresh and get away from the glob of boats in the area. It kind of panned out but like I said, I'm happy with our day --weather considered-- and our group hung tough with the sloppy weather.

So that is all. We'll be returning to the docks tomorrow sometime between 11:00 and noon, and we'll be turning around for another day and a half trip tomorrow evening. The weather is projected to come down and now all we have to worry about is getting a load of bait that doesn't die eighteen hours later. Take care and we'll chat with you tomorrow.

-The Supreme Team

Fun mixed bag fishing. 5 Yellowtail. 1 Bluefin and a lot of Kelp Bass. Forgot to take pictures. So here is one of the boat. 

We are continuing to see impressive schools. It seems everyday we are getting better responses out of them. Our last trip we had a good opportunity on the 60-90 pound fish, keeping 1 to 5 fish hooked for the better part of 4 hours. Getting a bite wasn’t the hard part but because we were forced to use our “finesse” gear we had to work very hard to land them. Hopefully the trend continues ! 

July 17
    Our morning started off hot.  We had some very good tailing for about 1 1/2 hours on the 16-22 pound grade.  We managed to get a few fish per rod in that amount of time frame before things went dead around 8:30.  It's OK, we were expecting that.  We stuck with the plan and looked for yellowfin after that and it wasn't long before we connected.  We had 2 good stops and one great stop on the yellowfin tunas and scattered small stops the rest of the day.  They were a bit on the small side but that's what's around here so we fished them.  After that we drove out of the zone to put ourselves in position for tomorrow and didn't catch much the rest of the day.

    We'll be tailing it again tomorrow looking for the bigguns down below first thing in the morning.  The weather this morning was great.  It got a little windy in the afternoon but it was OK.
                                

 

Captain Mike Pritchard checked in this afternoon at 1:52 PM with an audio update from the Tribute out of Seaforth Sportfishing in Mission Bay. We just finished up our two day trip and are headed back to the dock. We had very good fishing for. our rent rod charter. We had 20 anglers catch 184 Yellowtail and 8 Dorado.

We have one day trips departing tomorrow night through Thursday. We would love to take you fishing.

Wow, absolutely phenomenal fishing on the wahoo today. We fished daybreak to dark in two main spots. Wahoo everywhere we went. Lures, bombs, bait and trolling all worked. The anglers had a fantastic time in nice calm weather. We will be checking out a couple spots tomorrow and have another full day to fish the wahoo. Today Jeff prepared wahoo enchiladas for lunch and he absolutely nailed it. They were sooo good. Wish us luck for tomorrow. Thanks, Tommy and crew