Report by Neil Nichey
Aww man! Were we stoked for this trip or what? Dead Of Summer, wide open fishing up and down the whole coast. 18 FIB’ers boarded Todd Meyer’s Voyager out of Seaforth Landing for an overnight fishing trip. After baiting up and getting a tank of 4-6” nicely cured sardines we were off, and headed South past the Coronado’s down about 60 miles just south of Ensenada.

After an always anxious night sleep we had trollers out at grey light, and we were paddy hopping. On our first rotation we found a pod of dolphin; as we breezed through all the trollers went off, and we landed a bunch of 15# Yellowfin Tuna. Try as we may we couldn’t keep them at the boat with our bait offerings. We were able to catch back up with the pod, and get a couple more jig strikes throughout the day on the same grade of Tuna.
Most of our day was paddy hopping, the paddies were really few and far between, but when we found them all of them would be loaded with 10-15# Yellowtail and Dorado. These were great fighting, sporting fish. All the Dodo’s had great color and were very acrobatic. We would slide onto a paddy, and the fish would charge the boat, and they were chewing everything!!! Fish were landed on bait, surface iron, flatfalls, jerkbaits, and coltsnipers. The melee was so fun to watch. We sure do have a great club. We work well together. I’ve never seen an open party trip where we had 10+ fish on at one time and everyone actually worked together to land fish.
As the sun started to fade, so did the bite, and we headed back to the barn, everyone smiling and laughing as we shared stories of the day and our anticipations for the rest of the season. Todd runs a tight ship, and with Casey as his Second, Chuck running the deck and RJ running the galley, we were well taken care of.