NEVER GIVE UP

The trip is over and it truly was one for the books in many ways. Before I start summarizing I’ll tell you about today. We wound up fishing near Cabo and we were hoping to go out with a bang tuna wise in the same spot we pulled it off last year on this trip. We began fishing extremely early as always but by late in the afternoon we hadn’t seen the slightest sign of tuna. We were chumming the entire day, and the kite was out the entire day but only a few die hards were still tuna fishing. We killed the day doing a little bottom fishing and we did land some beautiful grouper, but by 4:30 I would guess that 95% of the passengers had broken down their gear and didn’t even have a tuna set up available. Vladimir Kustudic, however, was still fly lining bait but had gotten a little chilly in the stiff breeze we had today and strapped his rod to the rail with the clicker on and walked over to get a jacket. Before he could get his arms through the sleeves his reel went off. He figured it was a shark and pulled hard with a heavy drag. Ten minutes later to everyone’s surprise, no check that, everyone’s shock, he landed a 231lb tuna which is officially the jackpot largest fish of the trip. What a lesson in persistence and never giving up. It was the only tuna we were even close to today and just one more strange happening for this trip. I saw so many things I’ve never seen happen before on this trip that you would have thought it was my first and not my 50th. Talk about a first, at one point in the trip Tom Neumann hooked a shark and to make a long story short, while we watched helplessly, it actually chewed completely through the 4 inch diameter anchor rope setting us adrift until the crew rigged up another. Roy put him in the GPS and now he has an official spot (the Neuman Spot) named after him. Very cool for him, not so much for Frank who’ll have to buy another anchor. There were many more strange occurrences on this trip but there’s not enough time for everything and I’ve got a lot of people yet to mention. In the first report that never made it out I detailed the great give aways that Izorline and our charter master Ben Okazaki handed out in addition to supplying us with all the heavy line we needed. The contributing sponsors that I thanked then were Calstar Rods, Seeker Rods, Tady Lures, Salas jigs, Phenix rods, Owner hooks, Dave Hayami Custom Dykes, and Cal Sheets. I also want to thank the crew on behalf of all the passengers, Eddie, Deron, Doug, Jimmy (Rambo), Greg, our two fabulous chefs Tom and Joe, and last but hardly least the most aggressive fish hunter in the fleet, Capt. Roy Rose. We checked out more areas on this trip than I’ve ever done since they closed the Islands. Wherever we went none of us had any doubts that Roy was trying as hard as humanly possible to put us on big fish. That being said, I’d be dishonestly reporting if I told you that this was one of the great ones. For the most part the fish were not nearly as cooperative as our efforts deserved and we surely would have liked to have seen more fish over the 100 pound mark. In a word, that’s fishing! Your only recourse after a somewhat slower trip like this is to book another one and hope you get the fish of your dreams on that one. That’s what I’m doing so check back in early February when I’ll be aboard again bringing you more reports and more rhymes. Hope you enjoyed my logs from this one, it’s been a pleasure and an honor.

POEM OF THE DAY

The fish caught near Cabo San Lucas
Were slimy and covered with mucous
One said to me
”Best set us free”
If you eat us, you’ll probably puke us.