"This morning when we began filtering out on deck around 3AMish there were dozens of small but hungry sharks swimming around the boat," said the report for Royal Polaris December 11.

"It made it impossible to fish with a skipjack until they dissipated unless you wanted to try it with only half a bait which of course we did not. Eventually they departed but only Eddy Sisom was successfully able to catch both a whole skipjack and a tuna around 150 pounds. That was the entire morning bite. During the course of the day the bait bite as well as the kite failed to live up to yesterday's standards number wise, but the fish we landed were very nice quality 60 to 150 pounds with more of the bigger size than the smaller. Aki Higashi scored his personal best tuna of around 160 pounds. By late afternoon every thing had gone completely dead and nothing had been hooked for a few hours. The fat lady was on the first verse, the crew was beginning to clean the battle area, and the showers were doing a brisk business. Ed Delaney who continues to be red hot, had been on a kite just shy of forever and just killing time until they brought him in, soaking two dead baits on a double trouble rig. You can no doubt see where this is heading. He wound up landing a 208-pounder in the bottom of the ninth for the sole cow of the day. Wind was stronger today than it was yesterday, and we had rain on and off most of the day. Last night when the crew was catching flyers, it rained very hard, at least that's what they told us. All we passengers know was it was nice and dry down in our bunks while they were hard at work. We will try it again here tomorrow."