elephant butte lake Fishing Report 2024

24 nice grade yellowtail. 100+ miles on our track line today, we now know where not to be.

176 yellowfin tuna 2 skipjack tuna. Finesse bait gear has proven to be very important. Today’s high liners were fishing 15&20 lb and #4 & #2 live bait hooks. Keep a 40 lb rod nearby because we have had some short windows of aggressive fish.

Beautiful weather and good fishing. 19 yellowtail 145 calico bass 17 barracuda 23 whitefish 5 sheepshead.

Here we have Chad. Chad loves a good Monday bend. Especially when there is a big Guadalupe Yellowfin Tuna on the other end! 

~~Aug 25
 We had a slow day today.  The morning seemed promising.  We caught a little but we saw a whole lot.  If just one of those schools we saw this morning wanted to bite a little we would of had a great day.  That seems to be the deal this year though.  Today, we hit the wrong schools.  We caught about 20 ish this morning from 30-50 pounds.  The afternoon stunk.  We ran in to where we finished up last night and it was muerto.  We ended up in an area late that had mucho fish but unfortunately they were all small.  We didn't even try them.  It wasn't worth wasting our precious sardine for. 

 The good news about not catching much fish this afternoon is we still have some of a tank of sardine left to fish with this morning.  It's 4:00 AM as I write this and we just finished up with our attempt at bait making.  We caught plenty of bait, but it wasn't a good size for the tuna that's out here so we're going to try and make some lemonade here.  We're going to take our big spanish mackerel and take it to where the 150+ pound bluefin live.  We'll do this after we run out of sardine this morning.  No one has tried that cow BF with a couple tanks of spanish yet.  Maybe that's the key to it all.

 The weather remains great.  We had a few hours this afternoon where things were getting interesting.  We had a descently strong wind out of the southeast and with it came some rain.  It wasn't all that neat but it didn't last long.  Things went back to butter.  Nice.
       

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 Sept. 5
 The bluefin were a no go again today. We once again saw plenty of schools, they just don't bite. We ended up picking up 3 60-80 pounders. I wanted at least 3 to make jackpot easier, unfortunately for an easy jackpot but fortunately for a Mike Grella, 2 of them were caught by the same man and no one person can take more hen one place. We'll just have to weigh a bunch of those wahoo. We scratched at the yellowfin all day long. In the afternoon we were seeing straight schools of it but it wouldn't bite too well. One at a time. Anyways, the fat lady has sung. We are on the way to the barn all fat and happy. It's been a great trip. Lots of wahoo, yellows and tuna. Tommy will be coming back out for 5 days and I'll be going home. Ever since my wife went back to work I only get to see her and my daughter on the weekends that we're in for the morning and for the last month that's only been once so I'm looking forward to spending some time with them and watching some NFL,
 eating some bluefin and wahoo and relaxing. See you all in 5 days.