Our Mirage trip was awesome! Our fishing crew began arriving around 5:30. Many arrived early, checked in for the trip, and then went to dinner. Five of us went to “Quincy Street”. Others went to various restaurants around Oxnard. We all made it back to the dock for boarding the Mirage at 9:00pm. Many of us had long faces after looking at the fish count for the previous day’s dock total: only 3 Whiteseabass were caught for the whole fleet.
We boarded the Mirage and began setting up our tackle. Captain Ryan shared that for the last 8 days Whiteseabass fishing was slow. We left the dock at 10:00pm. The first part of our fishing adventure was a little rock & roll. We arrived at Santa Rosa Island at about 4:15am. Captain Ryan took us to a spot that had not been fished for 8 days because of rough seas. Today’s weather was foggy and seas were calm with just a little roll. We started fishing for squid. An adequate amount of live squid were caught. We began fishing for whiteseabass at about 5:50am. Paula Kunkel caught the first whiteseabass a 12 pounder at 5:55am. Within a few minutes fishing bedlam broke out. We had at least 6 hookups going at all times, the scene was wild with fisherman running about, hooked onto big fish. The crew was GREAT! For the next 3 hours we had steady hook-ups of whiteseabass: 29 were landed and a few sad hook-ups were lost. We also experienced several sharks that gave many a false hope battle only to end in disappointment when it turned out to be a shark.
We had a dead time for about 2 hours before we headed out for rock fishing. The boat total for our trip was 2 California, Halibut, 2 ling-cod 31, Ocean White fish, 133 Rock Cod and 29 WHITESEABASS.
We had several top gun fisherman: Mike Kaneen landed 6 of the prized white sea bass, Adam Ho brought 5 on board. The over limit fish were shared with other fisherman. We also had a top gun woman fisherman (I’m old school), Paula Kunkel, landed not only 3 of the prized fish but she caught the largest at 18.5 lbs.
Special thanks needs to be expressed to the crew on the Mirage: Captain Ryan, Second Captain Chase, Alex in the galley and Victor & Larry on the deck. They were excellent at helping all fisherman land hooked fish and at untangling line, both for whiteseabass and rock cod. Erin, in the office, helped our club by adding two extra fisherman: Bob Gradias and Mercy Urrea, both very nice people and excellent fisherman.
The trip home was on glassy seas, with low clouds and small patches of sun. Our trip was “ONE FOR A LIFE TIME” for whitesea bass fishing. Wish more of our club could have experienced this trip.
Ken Kunkel, Charter Master