great south bay Fishing Report 2025

Monday, August 5th, 2013

Hi friends. Different style of reporting from me today. I'm going to give you little segments of information from our day. Before I forget, Travis Donahue would like to say hello to the lovely little flower that is his wife, Jackie, and hello to his lovely little garden that he calls his children. So sweet. Also, Tex wanted me to share with the worldwide web that he is slayin' the yellas. He also shared with us that there is a better vodka out there than Tito's. We're skeptical, because anyone that knows Team Supreme knows that it's Tito's or get out of our houses. You've got 7 bottles to send your boys, Tex. Anyhoo, here is a few short segments of how our day transpired.

-Started the morning off with a nice worklist. Various engine room and upkeep that is needed on a boat to maintain proper working order. Fixing leaks, changing light bulbs, cleaning under mains, and various other little projects. Nice to be sweaty and greasy before breakfast.

-Gunny got the gang into the galley and gave an in-depth dropper loop seminar. How do you dropper loop? You drop your loop and hang on tight. Thanks, Guns.

-Breakfast was baller. Huge breakfast burritos with whatever you desired. I had the works, complete with chorizo, eggs, potatoes, bacon, salsa, queso, and avocado. Oh yeah, get on my level, bro.

-I was off last trip but I came onto the boat to be pleasantly surprised that the boys had dusted off "The Big Banana" after a brief hiatus. Never ceases to amaze me that the only piece of saltwater gear I own is so very popular to passengers and crew alike. We put that thing to use today and The Banana was on fire! As she usually is, we bent the hooks on our surface iron. Yep.

-Mark, after a long dry spell, was issued 10 minutes of hard hat time. His offense was tying a halibut dropper loop, on fluorocarbon, and not only tying it but tying it wrong. Gunny took one look, wrapped the line around his hands and snapped it like a Popsicle stick. Maaaarrrrrk!

***03:54 hours update*** For anyone that knows me, I enjoy me some channel 46 on the Sirius radio. Channel 46 is the Old School Hip Hop station and it plays a certain song that gets me fired up and that song usually comes while I'm typing up a report about a great day of fishing, and right now is no exception. The song is "Today Was A Good Day" by Ice Cube and today was just that, a good day. Riddler just flashed me the "Westside" sign with his fingers from his bunk. Right back at ya, Tommy!

-For all of my nonsense in my report thus far, our morning wasn't all that sweet, considering the boats here in the previous two days absolutely clobbered the Yellowtail. We scratched a few handfuls of 'tail in the 15-22 lb. range but it was nothing to write home about. We fished hard and then the lunch call was given. Per request of Tom, we do a custom sandwich station on table 3 complete with all the various ingredients to build yourself a baller sandwich. While we were making some sammies, Riddles put us on a nice drift and they came up boilin' right next to the boat real nice and we had a decent drift some 'tail. I saw a few sandwiches go flyin' but the beauty of our setup was that you could just go make another one when the bite was over. Fantastic. I made myself a deli quadruple, all the fixins, and a pickle.

-A couple hours after our lunch drift, we got on the mother lode. For the next few hours, the Yellows were snappin' real nice. As wide upen as you could ask for on the fly-lined sardines and jigs and an excellent grade to boot with most being in the 18-25 lb. category. We were busy, busy, busy. Fun times! The sun was shinning, the weather was great, and the staple guns were firing. Just what the doctor ordered. The gang had a blast.

-During the melee, Chef Shawn rocked out a Bluefin poki, Tequila Lime chicken wings, and white rice for an afternoon snack. I managed to sneak in and eat 14 bowls of poki and rice. Wowza! Good job, Shawn, now get out on deck on help us out!

-Throughout the day, I was designated "camera guy" so I got to play Austin Powers and snap away. Hope y'all enjoy the photos. Not going to lie, we were so busy that it was hard to find the time. We were also so busy, that we forget to write down one of our box drops into the RSW. For the life of us, we couldn't remember if we had missed one. We got things squared away and our count looked plenty better. We had a fantastic afternoon!

-We tried for squid and seabass at dark but no dice. I got showered up and served a fabulous dinner that Chef Shawn and Sweet D prepared. I had to take photos and write down what the heck we were eating. Sesame and spicy seared Bluefin tuna, with a Sriracha vinaigrette and ginger/carrot sauce, wasabi mashed potatoes, and sesame stir-fried green beans and edamame. It was bananas. For dessert, Mama D gave us plenty of choices but most chose her "brownie delight" that we enjoyed a couple nights prior, I know I did. Great job, Team Galley.

So that is all! A lengthy report for just a dandy of a day. It was truly a lot of fun and a really nice change of pace for the gang. We're currently headed up the line to drop a few lines on some coastal high spots to hopefully load up on some reds and lingcod. We'll only have a very limited time frame to get down but we'll be at it first thing in the morning. In closing, our weather is OK, our day was splendid, and judging by my food intake today, I am now a diabetic. See ya. Wrap-up report tomorrow. Take care.

-The Supreme Team

P.S. Hi again, Drew! I have to go prime the watermaker. My bad!

Our very light load charter of 11 people had some fun finesse fishing. They were able to trick 18 bluefin 3 yellowfin 10 yellowtail and 1 bonito.

In addition to the great Wahoo fishing last trip JJ was able to sneak a whole skipjack down below then to pull out this nice Grouper! Hell ya JJ!

Oct. 7

Hello out there in the internet world of the Polaris Supreme. It's been a while since I have been able to write to you all. This is because down there in the lower lower latitudes our satellite service isn't available therefor I am unable to send out any emails. So this will be a trip wrap up of our time spent down below...

First of all we had a great trip. Of our 5 1/2 days down here we landed 50+ tuna over 100 pounds. 15 of those went over 200 pounds and 1 of those will most likely go over 300 pounds. It taped off at 297. A real beaut. We also released at least 17 tuna over 100 pounds and threw in 50+ wahoo as hole fillers. That's not a bad fish count for 20 anglers. We had 8 anglers. Fantastic.

We got a little nervous when we first arrived down there at 4:00 a.m. of the 2nd. We stopped the boat first on some flying fish to try for some of them to put on the kite and during the drift we could see many sharks swimming around and chasing the flyers. We got the anchor down around 5 and it wasn't getting better. A big shark problem is what we had on our hands. They were making it unfishable. We had a 1 hour window that morning when the tuna were more aggressive then the sharks and managed a handful of big tunas with the Jer-Bear getting one over 200 pounds but it was short lived. The tuna backed off and the sharks took over again. We had enough and tried pulling the anchor but it got stuck and we lost everything. Damn. While we were putting one of our spair sets on we trolled it up for wahoo but we couldn't get past the 50-80 pound tunas to get to the wahoo. On most trips that would be good but on this trip we release those babies. After doing that for a while we got the anchor back down and things never really got rolling. We had a shark problem. Like I said we, were a little nervous after the first day.

Day number 2 didn't start off any better. We had a shark problem. Every bait we put out hooked a grinner. We didn't give it too long before we got to trolling again and this is what we found out. The cows were biting the marauders. We were trolling them up! ? That was a first for me. We were getting fish from small ones we would release to fish up to 215! You never know with fishing. It's a crazy game. So we had it all figured out. For the rest of the day this is what we did. We would troll around with our marauders and our yummy flyers on the kite and catch tuna and wahoo. The 4 remaining anglers not trolling were getting them fishing sardines on the slide. We stayed very busy. 15 fish over 100 that day with 2 of those over 200. The weather picked up that day and would stay windy for the remainder of our time here.

Day 3 was more of the same except the sharks disappeared and we were getting more tired. The fish were getting harder to pull over the rail. We also lost our Matt to an injured knee. We're not sure how it happened. To much of banging it on the rail scooping flyers and he may of hit it on a tuna some how but however it went down he was done. He could barely move about the boat let alone gaff a 200 pounder. Also our fearless leader, and I mean that, hurt his back prier to the trip and has had a hurt wrist for some time now was of little help gaffing 200 pounders as well so we were down to 3 of us and a "Gringo". That's our galley assistant. That's right Gringo fans, he's been back for some time now. Any hoo around 5:00 p.m. things started to really liven up with tuna flying out of the water everywhere so we threw the anchor over and had pretty much wide open fishing on the bigguns till about 7:30. We landed 12 over 100, most of those closer to 200 with 4 of them over that mark. Nice.

Day 4 was different. The tuna stopped biting on the troll and things got back to the way we're used to. Anchor fishing and we did well. The fish started biting at 1:00 p.m. for a little while then things slowed down until around 5:30 when things went ballistic similar to the night prior. 11 fish over 100 with 4 of those over 200 and George getting his personal best which went 297. We're hoping it goes over 3 at the dock. We'll see. When I'm giving these fish counts keep in mind we are releasing many fish if they aren't in the 200 pound range.

Day 5 was pretty much spent on anchor. We had a late night with Brian being stuck on a big one for hours. We didn't get to bed until 11:00 p.m. so when the crew woke up at 4:00 a.m. nobody was awake except Charlie. Here's why. He had a 186 pounder completely wreck him. I mean he got his but kicked like I've never seen him get his but kicked before. This happened the day before so he went to bed early that night and was up with us bright and early. Anyways he had a 207 landed before anyone else was even up besides the crew. He hooked another one shortly after that too but after a long battle the fish one and lived to fight another day. We had more action throughout the day but there were many lulls in between the action but it was a slower day for sure. Not a slow day though. We had 7 over 100 with 3 of those going over 200 pounds. Tommy had been keeping an eye on the storm that's been brewing the whole time we were down there and decided on this night to start heading north to keep us all safe. The storm became a tropical storm and was still getting stronger and closer so we had to take off leaving 1 day to fish somewhere north.

Here are some firsts for me and most others on this boat that happened while we were down there: I have never seen a shark problem that bad and then seeing them disappear like they did. One hour it was not fishable and that afternoon they were pretty much all gone,. I have never seen a 200 pounder let alone so many 200 pounders and just big tuna in general bite the trolled marauders like they did for a few days down here. I have never seen a 186 pounder jump completely out of the water right next to the boat after being on the line for 5 minutes or any amount of time for that matter. The fish must have thought it was a dorado. I have never seen Charlie not at the rail 100% percent of the time the fish were biting and it's because of A. he's reached the age of 60 but mostly B. I have never seen fish fight as hard as they fought on this trip. I mean they were brutal. Mean mean fish. I have seen 350+ pounders come in much easier then the 160+ pounders we were hooking. We lost a lot of big fish on this trip. We think about 50% of the big ones we hooked we lost. Not because of angler error but because these were just mean mean fish.

Here are some of the pricey things that happened during the trip. We lost one set of anchor gear, we lost 2 big giant 12 volt batteries, our refrigerator broke down , we lost and broke 3 gaffs, fuel prices are nasty, but the look on Matts face when I offered him a sponge bath because he couldn't stand up in the shower was priceless. Oh Mathew. He's doing a little better then before. The swelling went down a little and there is a little less pain then he had before but the poor guy has got to be just borred out of his mind and just bummed he missed out on some great big mean tuna fishing.

We will keep you filled on the ride home .

Captain Jodie Morgan called in with a wrap up from their recent 2 day trip last night. We had 75 Bluefin Tuna (in the 30 to 40 pound class), 63 Yellowtail, and a Dorado. We have a 2.5 day trip departing Sunday night with open spots. The trip is $625 and includes your meals and permits. Call Fisherman's Landing at (619) 221-8500 to get in on the action.

Well what the heck! I just went to go get some pictures to post on our wrap up of Tom Chaparros six-day trip! Yes that's right it was a six-day trip not a five! And next year it is going to be a seven-day trip! If you care to join Tom and his gang give Susan a call! He limits his trip to only 18 anglers. Anyways I went to go get some pictures out of our files and all we had was pizza! And then I realized the only slow day of fishing we had out of six days was the day we made pizza! Thus the only day we had time to take pictures! We were too busy gaffing 18 to 22 pound average yellowtail and or 15 To 16 pound average yellowfin tuna! Our fishing was absolutely fantastic. The yellowtail fishing was excellent surface iron and fly line sardine as well was the yellowfin tuna fishing. A iron throwers paradise. One thing I should point out about Tom's trip as well as every trip we've had so far this year is that our weather has been absolutely superb! I think maybe we've only had two choppy days in the last 33. Tom Chaparros seven day trip next year 2018 will be departing on Wednesday August 1 and arriving Wednesday, August 8. After getting to see what great fishing we could get into stretching the trip 1 day and seeing some of the other boats on longer trips getting a shot at the Wahoo it got everyone to want to extend the trip. Please check with Susan and Tom to see if they have openings. Thanks for tuning in and checking us out we have a few openings coming up in the fall please check out our schedule to see if something fits in to join us for some fantastic fishing. The Polaris Supreme Crew !

July 20
  Good evening folks.  Turn around day today.  In and out.  Unload, fuel, cherish baby, load, load and go.  That's how it goes down.  The bait receivers was fun.  Turns out all that rain we got may have effected the sardine we get there.  It's speculation but things weren't right.  We got some bait though.  Some good sardine and some good mackerel.  Yellowtail bait.  Tommy is back on board for this trip and he's decided to start off tailing tomorrow.  We're going to tail our butts off.  We'll see how it goes tomorrow but we most likely will get our tuna on the day after.

  Getting to know your crew: I've told you Mark is trying to bring his weight down.  Well Justin is in the same mode so I had an idea.  They're both throwing 50 bucks down.  He who loses the most weight by October 1, or the closest date we have a scale to October 1 takes the money.  Now that's a battle.  We have a couple of hungry crew members for sure.

  My rivals are on board this trip.  Many San Francisco Giant fans.  Uugh.  It just so happens that a 3 game series between them and my Pads start tonight.  I'm actually listening to the game now.  4-2 Pads in the 7th.  Now I know this is a fishing blog but it's a travel day.  You love it anyways.  I'll talk fishing tomorrow.
       and go Pads!

HOT TRIP TO BE ON!!! APOLLO still have 5 spots open for an 8 day trip leaving Mon Nov 13th at 9am & returns Tues Nov 21th at 9am. Cost is $2400. Limited load to 12 anglers. This your chance for an awesome trip. Call for info and reservations at Fisherman's Landing @ (619)221-8500