west central florida Fishing Report 2024

We departed today on Larry Brown's annual 10-day trip with 22 fine anglers. Most are repeats as they join Larry each year, but we are delighted to have a couple of new comers. We are in good weather and are happy to be driving out of the sooty smoky air. The group is excited after seeing Drew's great catch from the last trip. He had Dorado, Wahoo, those big cow Yellowtail and some Yellowfin with the jackpot weighing in at 160 lbs.! We are also getting reports that fish are moving in a new area and want to bite. This is all good news. So I will close for now as we get ready for dinner of filet and lobster with vegetables and a baked potato. Thanks for checking in and we'll update again tomorrow.

Tom Rothery docked his Polaris Supreme July 18 after an eight-day trip with 16 anglers aboard. His group found some good fishing at Alijos Rocks and Alijos Bank.
"Yesterday we had good fishing on wahoo in the morning," he wrote Sunday July 15, "and excellent fishing on tuna in the afternoon. The average weight on the tuna ranged from 45 to 70 pounds. Our weather is still good. Chef Tommy put out some great meals again. Lunch yesterday was yellowtail served over fresh spinach, surrounded by black beans with a spicy avocado cilantro sauce. And dinner was Cornish game hens topped with a spicy apricot sauce on wild rice with grilled asparagus on the side.
"Fishing this morning has started off again with wahoo biting and this afternoon we will fish the tuna again. We still have some open spots on Sept. 8th an 8-day trip, if you want to come get some of these wahoo. Give Susan a call at 619-390-7890."
Boat builder Harold Davis fished on the trip. "It was a great group," said Harold, "and we had four guys who had been skippers on the Bongos boats in Newport Beach. The whole group was good fishermen; we didn't have many tangles or much shoulder bumping. We had excellent food, too, like prime rib, rack of lamb, Ahi steaks with wasabi. My best fish was a yellowfin tuna, but I got some wahoo on bombs; purple bombs."
Zander Rodriguez of Loveland, CO made his first long range trip with the group. Zander is entering the University of Colorado this fall as a baseball pitcher, at age 18. He also plays golf. He had the second-best yellowtail at 44.2 pounds, a wahoo, and also got a white seabass on the 13 Spot.
Skipper Rothery weighed the best fish on the certified scales at Fisherman's Landing. Daniel McCaffery of Norco won first place for a 60.8-pound yellowfin tuna. He said he fished a sardine on a 2/0 Super Mutu hook. He used 40-pound Big Game line on a TLD 20 reel and a seven-foot glass Calstar rod.

Bob Wolfson of Dana Point was second, for a 56.4-pound tuna, and Harold Davis, the boat builder from Morro Bay, won third place for his 52.4-pound Alijos yellowfin tuna.

July 18 We couldn't get in our groove today. Stops for 1,1,1,1,1. Saw plenty of fish. Nothing I would call a school but descent balls of fish that just wouldn't react for us. And that's all I have to say about that. Arrive depart tomorrow on another 5 day. July 17 We made awful time coming up the line from Cedros last night then all day we got tied up with all the tons of bluefin schools we passed along the way. 60 miles of the fish. We also scratched yellows on the kelps we went by. The albacore evening area moved up 20 miles and we didn't get to the grounds until 3:15.

 

 

 

We did manage to find a couple hungry biting schools of albacore before dark and put some more meat on the boat currently chilling at a comfortable 30 degrees. Weather is fine and we're going to enjoy some delicious lamb chop for dinner and hit the rack. We'll be here tomorrow to finish up the trip. We are far away from home but we'll stay as long as the fish are biting. Sorry Tommy, we might be getting home late on Monday. July 16 For the past 2 weeks if you were a long range boat at Cedros you just rolled up to a certain spot on the island, shut down and made a day of it. Not today, that certain spot was not happening today. We had to fish. It took a while to locate them but around 11:30 we did. 6 schools up at a time. Unfortunately they were not biting fish. We'd stop on a big school for 6, stop on one for 3,1,0,6,12, like that. At 5:30 we stopped on the mother load school and had them almost jumping in the boat they were so thick but yet again, it didn't bite like advertised. We did get quite a few there and hit a couple more schools before dark where we caught some fish. Perfect weather today and should remain that way for at least a couple more days. We're going to take advantage of the glassy sea and head back offshore for the remainder of the trip. Good night. Drew and the famous crew of the Polaris Supreme. July 15 We started off at the night before hot evening bite area with the fleet. We drove 20 miles to far before light. A code boat who had a later jump passed through that area at daylight and found some biting albacore. So the fleet slides up 20 miles. When we got up there we had time for a couple of stops before the door slammed shut. From then until we left, SLOW. We started to slide down. 20 miles later we're back where we started and we see the fish. 1 good stop, 3 short stops and 1 great stop later, we're headed down to the Island for some great yellowtail fishing and sun block wearing weather. Oh yeah, the weather today was just fine. Drew and the crew. July 14 Good afternoon viewers. We arrived at the dock early this morning and weighed up jackpot. 1st was Tim Ryan with a 36.6 albacore. Second was Kirk Kirkpatrick with his 34.6 pounder and bringing up third was Dennis Mc Neely with one at 33.6. We are now rolling down in beautiful much overdue sunny weather. We have a full load of fantastic sardine and passengers eager to use them. I'm just sitting in the wheelhouse starring at my water charts and listening to my code boats trying to figure out where to be tomorrow. We're going to start somewhere offshore tuna fishing. The reports don't sound to great so we might have to do some fishing tomorrow and try and relocate these albacore. The weather forecast looks great so we have that going for us. It's almost seminar time and shortly there after dinner time.

The Apollo has a 2.5 day charter this weekend with openings. Departs the 29th at 5 pm, and returns June 1st at. 6am. Please contact Jim Wilson at +1 (909) 644-7780 for details.

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.

Ladies are absolutely killing it today! The OTR charter is really getting in on these great grade Yellowfin Tuna!

June 26
Good evening everyone, we're back!!!!  After 2 months of grueling boat work we are back on the water and couldn't be happier.  What's new with the crew?  Not much with most of the guys.  Jed got his captains license.  That's big news.  And I had a beautiful baby daughter in April.  That's big news too.  Mark's the same enjoyable goofball, Gunny's the same fish hunting fellow.  Schoolers still dishing out tasty meals and Gringo is back helping him out.  We also have some new crew members joining the supreme team this year.

We departed this evening on a 1 1/2 day trip.  We are pleased with  the bait we got because we lucked out and got a tank of sardine to go with a couple tanks of usable anchovy if need be.  Hopefully it will be because we run out of sardine with all the fish we catch.  The reports are fishy.  There's yellowfin and bluefin and yellowtail to catch if you find the right schools that want to bite and those are the schools we'll be looking for all day long tomorrow.  Weather reports are calling for some wind tomorrow but they downsized there forecast from this morning so hopefully it won't be too bad.  Time will tell.

Right now we're wrapping up our prime rib dinner and will be going to bed soon so we're all rested up for our big day tomorrow.  Sweet dreams and goodnight.


 

37 yellowfin 7 yellowtail 5 dorado 6 skipjack. Never located the magic kelp but we were able to plunk on a couple tuna schools.