CaptainRickyWheeler

I gathered up a couple friends so I could get the boat out for a day on the water, and truly test every system on the boat to see what needed to be fixed and what was working fine. The weather was flat, beautiful, and today was the New Moon. We started the day trolling up off of Guoyave to the north of the island in 6000-7500 feet of water. I saw a couple tunas sky out and turned towards them while quickly getting a couple 50W in the mix. WHAM! The left long went down, left flat got exploded on but missed, then the right flat came tight! Game On!

The battle on the 50was about 50 minutes and we boated a beautiful 120# Alison Tuna while we were still on the other that ate the 30# outfit. After an hour and 20 minutes, we got a harpoon at her but it grazed the back. 5 minutes later we got the 100 pounder in the boat!!

With that we made out way up to Ronde Island and anchored up for lunch to check all of those systems. Yup, battery charger for the windlass and bow thruster went bad. Anyway we still anchored for lunch and then made our way out to the edge in the afternoon to deep drop for snappers.

We did manage to catch a couple snappers and a couple black jacks deep dropping. The birds were working around us on top of blackfin tunas pushing some bait and we did manage to catch one of those as well. We called it a day after that and made our run home. Successful day overall other then my drone crashing into the water and sinking to the bottom and the list of things to fix, haha.

Well, we cleared out Quarantine here in Grenada by the end of our 4th day. The Ministry of Health Officials came and gave us our test in the morning and they had our results that evening. Today is Day 3 of being cleared here and luckily so far everything has been going fairly smooth with the boat. Sandy and I took her on a sea trial after I spent about 2 hours under the boat entirely cleaning off the running gear, making sure the shaft tube water holes were clear, and checked over the entirety of the bottom.

I gotta say, my Best Buy ever was a Brownie’s Air Compressor for this! If you have a boat in the water, having one of these is a no brainer (https://amzn.to/3eOhOu9). It’s easy to use, reliable, and great for anytime you need to go under your boat, especially in the feared rope wrapped in the wheels scenario. Anyway, still plenty of touch ups to do as far as simple little fixes around the boat to get everthing perfect. We hope to do a fishing trial on Saturday so stay tuned.

I hope everyone is well and pushing through the Covid Chaos to the best of your ability. I am hoping the borders of many places start to open, especially here in Grenada where I have just arrived and am Quarantining for 4 days before I am free to move about and get the 60′ Custom Precision back up and running. In the meantime, check out my new website for my Charter Fishing Company www.FishDownseaCharters.com. I also wanted to share some awesome tuna fishing action from down here in Grenada from a couple years back. Enjoy…

We slipped in a trip on the Low Profile and made our way out in a 15 knot NE wind with a steady 4’ swell. With sea bass season being open we decided to start there and got into the action right away boxing a limit of 60 sea bass in less then 2 hours. The water temp was 66 degrees in the 20 fathom area.

After that we made our way to the Lindenhohl canyon where we had 71 degree blue water with scattered weed in it. We started off pot hopping but the Mahi were not too receptive. We managed to box about a dozen before we got on the troll. We trolled til dark and had no action. We did three drifts all night and never had a touch! Ouch.

With the sunrise we decided to give pot hopping another try and finally got the Mahi going well boxing 39! Great action. After that we made a drop for daytime swords and got hooked up on the second drop! After about 30 minutes we boated the sword and capped the trip off there! Good Times with these guys as always!

We had a small window of opportunity to slip out to the canyons and try for some daytime swordfish. I ran out with Kevin, Chris, and Eric on a 36′ Yellowfin and we ran out and got started around 7:45am in 66 degree blue water. We ended up not seeing much on the screen as far as bait and did a few drops with no success. We moved a couple of times and finally around 215pm got hooked into a sword on a fresh squid we caught on one of the earlier drifts.

We battled this monster sword on a Shimano Beastmaster for quite some time. She jumped once showing she was easily over the 200 Pound Mark! We got her to the leader in about 2 hours but it was give an take for awhile with the swordfish making lots of erratic moves that we had to counter. Finally after giving it her all, she popped up on the surface and we got a harpoon into her and shortly after two gaffs. What a fish! Extremely impressive fight!

We started our last trip of the NJ season aboard the Wish You Were Here trolling for yellowfins and managed to go 2/2 in two hours inshore. We bumped offshore and pot hopped for Mahi a bit but there wasn’t much to it as we only managed to catch a handful.

We setup for the night time fishing heavily targeting swordfish. We made three drifts with 0 success. Ouch. We made a move for the morning to get into some tuna action. We started trolling but I wasn’t seeing many signs other then a few tuna marks on the bottom. We got on the chunk and ended up getting into some chunking and jigging action catching some solid 60-70+ pound class yellowfin. So much fun!!! Great trip with great people!

We had absolutely perfect weather this weekend to run an overnight trip on the Wish You Were Here. We started in the Lindenkohl Canyon and trolled for an hour and didn’t see much so we tried pot hopping for a bit. There were plenty of small Mahi on the pots but most had lockjaw. We managed to get a dozen on the box. After that we did 5 deep drops for swordfish and hooked three but unluckily pulled the hook on all three.

We got back on the troll and made our way up to the Carteret which was dead and ended back in the Lindy for the night. At night we managed to go 2/3 on 90-100 pound swordfish, released a mako that was about 120 pounds, and fought a huge manta day for 2 hours before we finally saw it was in fact a manta day and not a big swordfish.

For Sunday morning we ran inshore and found crazy whale and dolphin life all over the surface and the tunas were in there. We managed to box 6 stud yellowfins ranging from 55-75lbs. Really awesome trip with a great group of guys!

We gave it a shot today hoping the magic in 30 fathoms would maintain for us today. Unfortunately it did not but we did still managed to grab one nice yellowfin tuna out of three bites by noon. We weren’t seeing any signs that showed anything would develop so we tried our luck out in the canyon for the afternoon but it was overall lifeless. We did manage to pick at some Mahi and got a healthy box full of those, but tough fishing today.

The marlin fishing locally has been overall slower this season, quite possibly one of the slowest season in the past decade. With that, we have managed to pick at them, but we wanted to give it one last try before the NE wind from all of these storms moved in on us. We started the morning on the Wish You Were Here trying to grab a couple tunas before we ran offshore to look for billfish. Unfortunately, the bite didn’t turn on until later and we had to leave if we wanted to go find some marlin.

We picked up and ran to the NE corner of the Wilmington. The pots were bare, no mahi at all, and not much for bait marks until I got up on the flats. the water was very blue, and finally after an hour of searching we got our blue marlin bite, and wow was it explosive. It piled on everything in the spread, we missed it twice, and finally I was lucky enough to get a third shot at her on my bridge rod. Game on! After a great display of acrobatics we got a release!

We managed to go one for two on white marlin after that and that was our day. We were lucky to get that kinda action and ended up having the best of it for the area. I’ll take it!