Ilwaco OTC tuna, and salmon with Salt Patrol

I was supposed to pre-fish the tuna tourney with Team Defiance on our new boat, fresh from the factory, Miss Guadelupe 290 on Friday. It turned out that Bo and the fellas were still shaking out the last minute bugs.
Instead of fishing with my team, I found some new friends at the dock in Ilwaco and hitched a ride for an afternoon of salmon wishing.....Matt was the owner of an older Silver Streak with an inboard V-8. It was having distributor issues and I took some time to chat with him and his crew while a marine mechanic was working over his distributor. Before lone the mechanic had it rolling again and Matt invited me to go out for the afternoon. We fooled around and released a bunch of non fin clipped coho and wound up with only one keeper and no keeper crabs for 4 pots.

Back at port that evening I went to the captains meeting and then got busy prepping gear and the boat for the next days activities. We had rigging of rods, ice for the boat, provisions for the crew all to get done before getting something to eat then off to get a few hours sleep.

Got busy on Saturday morning and did the final rigging, picked up some weak bait, and headed out for the shotgun start. The ocean was a bit rougher than the forecast but still pretty decent. At the gun we rolled West 35 or so miles and got our gear in the water. Hooked a couple of small fish and couldn't get them to go on live bait. Reports in the zone were scratchy so we decided to pound it out in the general vicinity of where we started. By noon we had about 8 in the box and by the time we had to haul but to the weigh in we had finally tallied 14 with some bigger ones in the mix. The tuna were just not that thick.
We dropped our fish at the weigh in dock and got the boat cleaned and ready to display in front of the tent just in time to make it to the dinner and awards. It turned out that we finished 11th out of 53 teams that left the starting line that day. Our buddies from salt Patrol wound up in 4th, just .10 pounds out of the 3rd place money.

Sunday, I got the invite to fish with John, Mark, and Rich on John's North River for salmon. Armed with some local salmon intel, we headed North to find some fish. Everyone had a turn to either land or lose a couple of fish including a couple of kings in the 20 to 25 pound range. While on the salmon grounds, I did my thing and carked the tuna that we kept for ourselves.

It was a nice weekend of fishing and friends in Ilwaco....Next stop....PSA Gig Harbor Derby.....



Me with a nice king:



Doing the tuna carking thing:



Til next tide!


Beeeeeeee