I walked outside today and felt the first strong north wind of the year. The first real cool front has arrived and that means transition time for offshore fishing down in Venice. That means less live baiting around oil rigs and more chasing around shrimp boats and chumming. To recap the Summer, it was a good one with plenty nice size yellowfins caught on most trips. We fished with live pogies for almost the whole Summerwhich worked out well because we caught most of our fish at rigs less than 25 miles from shore. The few times that I ran far this were some of my slowest days. The average size of the tuna this year was much nicer than last year. I saw very few fish under 40lbs and had a lot of fish in the 90-120 range. (No monsters this summer though) The mahi mahi were around this year in good numbers but we didn’t see many big ones. The highlight of my Summer was taking my 7 year old offshore for the first time. He caught plenty fish and he even got to pull on a 100lb yellowfin for a little while. He couldn’t bring him in by himself but he got to be a part of an awesome experience.
The last few trips I made were on the shrimp boats in 200-300 ft of water and the tuna have already gotten into their Fall pattern. Now I’m just waiting on this wind to settle down so we can get back to fishing. Also as a bonus, the cobia fishing is starting to heat up as well at the shallow rigs in 30-60 ft of water.
