Chad contacted late Saturday evening and asked me to take this charter for SFR Counts guy Homan, who had something come up and would not be able to make the trip. After getting my short notice "kitchen pass" I loaded up and headed to Channel Island Sportfishing for a day of fishing aboard the "Sumo" with Captain Mark Sawa and his crew.

We had a raffle befoe we reached the fishing grounds and SportfishingReport.com was proud to give away some nice stuff from Candy Catchers, Berkley Gulp, and JAX Jigs. Thanks to Doug Vernand for helping us get some good stuff for our crew today.

Capt Mark said we would be heading out to Santa Cruz Island and our first stop would be to try and get some candy bait. As we pulled out of the harbor, we had a "raffle" where everyone was a winner of either some "gulp", candy catchers, jax jigs or tady swim baits. Those candy catchers came in handy as Capt Mark told up to drop catch some squid, he put us right on top of them and within 30 minutes we had a solid 2 scoops of "candy" for the day. Chef Danny started serving breakfast and we all enjoyed some great sandwiches and breakfast burritos.

We then headed further north to look for those exotics and soaked a few baits with no action except for a few bat rays to get the blood pumping. We then moved to a nice reef with lots of marks and deck hand Keith started chumming some bait and within minutes we had boils all around us and the shout of hook-up and fresh one sang out around the boat. After a couple hours of Capt Mark put the call out to the other boats to come and join the fun. Within 30 minutes the other boats were all in the area and loading up.

I really enjoyed my first trip as "chartermaster" and thank all aboard for a great time and a lot of fun. I want to wish Kirk Hansen a very happy "50th" birthday, what a great way to spend your day, your son Nikolas did a great job getting all your friends together for the trip. I hope to share the rail with you all again soon.

Our final fish count for the day was: 78 Barracuda, 32 Calico Bass, 6 Rockfish, 3 Perch, 2 Sheephead, 2 Sculpin and 1 Whitefish. For any of the individual pictures you can email me at john@sportfishingreport.com and I'll get them out to you.hello