matthews Fishing Report 2024

Tuesday, September 4th, 2012

Hi friends. Tough day for us here on the high seas. No sugar-coating anything today, it was a slow day. We saw multiple good schools of yellowfin but Tropical Storm John really has things screwed up down here. We only managed a few handfuls of yellowfin in the 12-35 lb. category along with a couple of nice bluefin and a few various bottom dwellers for our final tally. Like I said, no shortage of fish running around but they are just not cooperating all that well.

We're hoping for a banner day tomorrow as the weather is supposed to straighten out and be flat calm and sick hot. I was a hot little potato today even though it was rather windy and choppy. We can only hope tomorrow that it snows or something because it is going to be a scorcher. Bronzing isn't even an appropriate word for what we did today, we got down-rite ethnic with our tans today. My goodness it was hot. Speaking of hot, our team in the galley is hot. Schooler and Shawn, aka "The Dream Team" are just magnificent. Along with the world's greatest deckhand, they really are the heart and soul of this operation and I feel that it is a pleasure to not only be worthy enough to eat their creations but to also know them as people. Thank you, Schooler and Shawn, thank you for making my life so wonderful and all of the passengers too. You're so dandy and thanks for getting us fat.

Anyhow, our fingers are crossed for tomorrow and yours should be too. Pray for snow and lots of tuna. See ya.

P.S. Dennis McNeely says "LYT" to Judy, Jennifer, and Mikey.

Nov. 13

We finished up the trip today mostly concentrating on yellowtail. We kept the wire on in case we got into some wahoo and weren't going to steer away from tuna either. Well we did get a wahoo today. A nice fat one. 60 pounder? We'll see at the dock. We saw a few schools of tuna that wanted nothing to do with us and we saw a few foamers of good grade yellowtails. We got on top of one of those foamers and they flashed us for a second and then left us. We only caught a handfull before they were gone. We chased down a few other schools but they all sank out before we could get to them.

To recap the trip we caught all you want on big fat dorado, lots and lots of school grade yellowfin tuna and had a pretty good catch of wahoo throughout the trip. We spent two full days hunting the cow yellowfin and saw plenty each and all day but only have a couple trophies to show for our efforts. A lot of non biting fish but that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes. We only had a couple days of choppy weather and other then that it's been beautiful. We're heading home right now with just a fantastic ride up the line.

Drew

Saturday, July 28th, 2012

Good evening, friends. We departed on an open party 5-day trip today with a healthy load of people and a healthy load of bait. Our weather traveling down is quite nice and we're looking like the weather is going to clean up for the next few days, so we're pumped. As far as the fishing outlook, one boat in the area today did equally phenomenal on bluefin and yellowfin. Straight up.We'll be in the area tomorrow and we'll chat you up tomorrow on our day.

Getting back to yesterday, we'd like to thank Paul Hess and his crew that tagged along with him this year. If I recall, this was Paul's 12th annual trip and we look forward to seeing him, his son, Matt, and the rest of the gang that comes back year after year (thanks for bailing, Boomhower. More bluefin and yellowfin for us.) Anyhow, It's a fantastic trip, one of my favorites every year, and we'll see y'all next year.

So that's all. We'll chat with you tomorrow.

~~Oct. 23
 Remember yesterday when I said we would find our dorado kelp?  Well we conquered that quest.  I tell no lies.  An hour or so after breakfast, maybe 2, we found a kelp loaded and we went to battle and overall I think we won.  I mean we caught exactly what we wanted.  Beautiful mahi mahi.  After that we went back to travel mode and we'll be arriving to our slip in San Diego tomorrow at 0800 hours.  We ate some of that mahi for dinner tonight while we watched a slide show of all the pictures taken this trip presented to us by Tommy.  Everyone misses there wives and they all told me, "Drew, I couldn't spend another minute without my wife".  That's why this trip was 15 days.  It's the maximum amount of time we can spend without our wives.

 So we tie up tomorrow and that's the way we'll stay until November 9th, when we'll be departing on a 10 day trip.  So until then, I'd just like to say how much I'll miss writing to you all.  Stay classy and thanks for stopping by, but mostly, stay classy.
         

2 stop shopping in perfect fall weather. Limits of Yellowfin, 15 Mahi Mahi and 56 Yellowtail.

Looked at an incredible amount of 30-60 lb bluefin and managed to land 4. One cooperative school of 20-30 lb yellowfin where we landed 46. A few random skipjack and perfect weather.