“Epic Dorado fishing. I have not experienced a local bite like this in 40 years. Everyone caught quality fish – many for their first Dorado ever. All positive comments: however, having no bait left at 6pm had us missing out on any sunset downer bite. Crew was upbeat and helpful. What a fun day on the Voyager!” Tom Handzus summed up an amazing day on the water and a quality group to go with it.
This trip was on the tail end of a hurricane in Mexico. We didn’t know what to expect on the weather. I sent out a group text to all of the FIB’ers letting them know I’d keep them posted on what gear to bring, departure time, and all the other charter master duties. Val responded with a weather report that didn’t sound like the ocean was going to be calm and the wind was going to be high. Rick Chalmers responded and said, “Let’s pray for better weather. We serve a big God.” I always ask Rick to kick off our trips off with the opening prayer and we all saw that God had other plans for the ocean that day. A lot of the FIB’ers were on the last trip and it was a rough trip. We weren’t looking forward to getting beat up again, but we were all prepared. We all exchanged greetings at the landing, loaded the boat, stopped for bait and headed out to the Mackerel Bank area between Catalina and San Clamente. The hunt was on.

We put out the trollers and started to look around. After a couple of hours of looking for the fish, Captain Chuck hightailed further west where there were a lot of boats congregated. We quickly dropped some baits. Rich Chalmers did the honors with the first quality Dorado of the day. This quickly turned to just about everyone hooking up. Everyone was amazed at the ariel jumping display the Dodos put on for us. That never gets old. We fished that area for the rest of the morning and picked away at the Dorado. Some of the new guys were getting the hang of fishing fly lined sardines. Junior Banda, Steve Woesner, Mark Cutles and Tom Drew were all able to catch a Dorado for the first time. Congrats to Junior on the biggest dorado of the trip. He landed an 18lb bull Dorado. Great catch, Junior! Too bad Junior wasn’t in the jackpot.

The ride going out was mildly bumpy but by the afternoon the weather started laying down and we were greeted with beautiful sunshine and calm seas. Chaplain Rick’s encouragement to pray worked. I think we all prayed and the day was very nice. What a great example that prayer changes things! The seas were calm and the fish were still hungry. We ended up heading further west in the early afternoon to another patty because the bite had slowed down a bit. We were on the fish again. There were a lot of fish just cruising around the boat. What an amazing site. Dave Shill landed the only Bluefin of the trip. It was the big fish of the trip that weighed in at 20lbs. I hooked something midday that ripped off around ¾ of my line within around 30 seconds. This thing wasn’t stopping for a second. I didn’t want to through this again. I didn’t want to have a fish swimming around with 300 yards of spectra, so I locked it down and broke the line off. I’d like to think it was a big Bluefin. Daryl Evans ended up with the second biggest Dorado at around 16.2 lbs followed by Tom Handzus’ 16lb even Dorado. Tom ended up taking the jackpot due because a few of the guys didn’t want to participate. Congrats Tom and hats off to Daryl who handed a few of his fish off to a few guys that were still learning the ropes.

Captain Chuck and his crew did an excellent job. They were always upbeat and responsive. They served some great meals and we look forward to fishing with them again. What a great crew! Thanks to Dave Shill and Ed Reeder for making the drive all the way from Yuma, AZ to make this trip. Ed stuck it out and kept going back for more despite a bad back. Everyone was able to take home close to limits of quality Dorado. There didn’t seem to be any dinks in the stack. We watched the sun dip below the horizon and we did see that green flash right before it dipped out. What an amazing site. By this time the ocean had gone almost completely flat. We arrived at the docs around 4, unloaded the boat and all 14 of us satisfied FIB’ers headed home. What an amazing trip and great group of people to fish with.

I’m always blessed to fish with such a great group of people.