lake leelanau Fishing Report 2024

Oct 7

I'm sure like most of you at home, every morning lately I woke up in anticipation to read Richie's next fishing report and was let down to see nothing written. I was hoping he was just too busy on those shorter trips to write one for me but it's leaked into long range now too. So I guess your stuck with me.

We left today on a 6 day trip. Our bait choices were between healthy but giant sardine or not so healthy normal size sardine. We chose some of both. We'll have to see how it turns out but I am sure we will have some die off. Hopefully just the weak ones. Time will tell.

The weather out in the fishing grounds sounds windy and rough. We'll be crossing through an area tomorrow sometime around 10 in the morning and depending on the weather we'll either work the area or fish on through it on a down hill course to other more fishable grounds. One of the boats had a wahoo through these waters a couple days ago so we'll be trolling wire.

Drew

Father, Daughter Ahi ! Conditions are trending in the right direction. It won’t be long now. Hope your here. 10 yellowfin for 26 anglers. Private Charters the next 2 days.

170 yellowfin 93 skipjack. Good weather and great fishing, didn’t feel like November today.

6 yellowfin tuna 4 bluefin tuna. Tough conditions on the grounds today. Lots of wind and current made it very difficult to land the 30-70 lb tuna we had under the boat. Weather is forecast to be nicer tomorrow. Come out and enjoy the calm before the storm.

Drew Henderson brought Polaris Supreme home to Fisherman's Landing August 31 following a five-day trip to Guadalupe and Benitos. Guadalupe yellowfin swept the jackpot. The Benitos yellows were good-sized, with one 46.6-pound whopper being the best of the species caught there, by Kub Ito of harbor City. Dan Tran of Hawthorne won first place, for a 98-pound yellowfin he bagged with a sardine on a 4/0 Super Mutu hook dangled under a balloon. He said he fished with 40-pound Big Game line, an Avet LX reel and a Shimano eight-foot rod. Phil Hidey of Arcadia was second, for a 75.4-pounder, and Joe Beck, a regular long ranger and retired LA motorcycle officer won third place, for a 63.6-pound Guadalupe yellowfin tuna.

64 yellowtail 2 bonito 1 barracuda. A few quick opportunities today.

July 26
    And we're off on another 5 day trip.  Things didn't go so hot at the bait receivers.  The bait we got was healthy, we just weren't allowed to take a full load.  We were shorted 75 scoops or so.  Anyways, we looked for fishies this afternoon.  We saw some small spots of yellowfin right out of the gates that wouldn't bite, and then didn't see anything until almost dark.  A sonar ball of yellowfin produced three fish so we got jackpot handled already. 1st, 2nd and 3rd.  We're going to slide down a little tonight and look in an area that produced some pretty darn good yellowfin fishing today.  The weather is magnificent.
                            

 

~~Aug. 28
 It was a busy morning for us today but a kick back afternoon. For the second time this year we are not fishing on our departure day. We did the usual turn around throwing in an oil and fuel filter change. We offloaded, then onloaded and then we took off before lunch. The bait was OK. It looked great but lost some scales putting it in our tanks. We'll see how it likes 80+ degree water in a couple of days. I decided to skip this 30 mile yellowfin zone today and get down below while we have a window of good hurricaneless weather. There will be some wind the next couple of days everywhere but should come down nicely for a week or so everywhere if the forecast holds true. I'm still not sure where we're starting yet this trip. We'll either head straight to the rocks or drag our feet for a day and wait for the weather to get pristine. For now there is some napping going on and just some old fashioned kicking back. Something we haven't seen a whole lot of this year as it has been straight to fishing out of the gates.