Fishing aboard Steve Drogan's 60-foot Mikkelson yacht Destiny with Dan Walsh and two other anglers, Paul Sweeney and I spent a pleasant day on the water July 30. We left the Kona Kai the night before and motored down to an area of kelps off Punta Banda, and then slowly worked our way back toward the Coronados. I say slowly because we trolled our way back. Without live bait (due to an apparent impeller failure), trolling was our remaining option.

Trolling worked very well, though, and it seemed we had a strike of some sort every few minutes. We hung a lot of different jigs back in the wake through the day, but the king jig was the cedar plug. That jig has held that title (especially with bluefin) as it has since I brought one aboard the Excel many years ago (Randy Toussaint was the skipper then) on a trip with Russ Izor, Carl Newell and other manufacturers. Another thing that hasn't changed much since then was the natural wood finish seems to work better than paint, skirts, eyeballs earrings or anything else anglers like to doll up a jig with.

The cedar plug took the most fish and the best fish, as noted by trip organizer Dan Walsh, who cooked the pizzas listed here:

The Day's Catch

11 pizzas of all types
6 passengers
2 crew (Skipper Julie Jordan and deckhand Doug Wagner)
2 Yellowfin tuna
1 Bluefin tuna
14 Dorado, 6 released
5 Yellowtail, all released
1 Albacore (honkin' size).

"A cedar plug," wrote Dan, "attached to my Accurate 30 reel and Seeker Black Steel rod, accounted for all tuna, the biggest dorado, and several of the other also-rans! All anglers that wanted a chance to reel in a fish on this rig had that opportunity, as it almost became a habit for this rig to get the fish today!"

Let it be known that Dan is now a cedar plug advocate. When he tried one the first thing in the morning he was a skeptic, but no more.

The Zucker's broomtail in zucchini color was another trolling jig that produced some good fish. I tried to get a fish by dropping a plastic bait back on the slide, but got no bites. I ate very well, however, and took a lot of still pictures. Sweeney got a few shots, too, and manned the Sony EX1 full high definition television camera. A large herd of white side dolphins or porpoise gave us a show in the afternoon.

We saw a few marlin jumping in the distance on our way north, but not much in the way of feeding birds or fish. The fish seemed spread evenly at both ends of our fishing journey. The yellowfin and the single bluefin were associated with plentiful kelps near the southern end, and the albacore bit less than 15 miles from the Coronados, south-southwest from the islands.

That was right about where Justin Fleck, Excel's current skipper had told me he encountered longfin two days earlier. Without bait or chum we couldn't bring the schools to the boat or keep them around, so after each fish we just moved on.

Judging by what I saw out there, this is the peak of the summer season, with tropicals like dorado and yellowfin coming up the line, and some albacore still around, though they may be beginning to move toward the north and west, their usual exit route. I'd be reluctant to predict the albacore leaving right now, though, since the water on both ends of our trip was close to 70 degrees. We saw 68 degrees on the southern end and 71 near the islands, where the albacore blessed us; so it might be wrong to draw inference from that.

It was a very nice day to be on the water, thanks to owner Steve Drogan. Thanks to Dan Walsh, too, for getting the whole thing together and for cooking his signature pizzas. If you haven't been out on the water yet, you might want to do it pretty soon, while the kelps are holding fish and the migration is on. There are a lot of small yellowtail and dorado on the kelps. Please release those. It just doesn't make sense to kill next year's fish.