The Day of Boat Related Problems (3/7)

[Latimeria]

It was supposed to be flat as hell out there and it happened to be as advertised!  On the way out the inlet, I got my first rude awakening... The fish finder reset and erased all of my waypoints!!!!!!  What the f@ck!!!!!!!  Gone... Finito....History.... UGH....

Then I get a phone call from an HR person on the east coast about a position.  I had to stop the boat and do a phone interview on the boat and wasting precious morning!  lol.  It turned out well, and I even got a call later in the day to set up a person-person interview on Friday.

Lobster boats pulled most if not all of their traps and I have no waypoints anywhere.  It took some doing to find fishable rockpiles with a lot of searching. The conditions were spot on though!



The FF was showing clouds of bait everywhere and I was assuming it was tuna crab.  I started catching some nice starry Rockfish and they started puking up some crab in the boat.  Bellies full of crab!  The crab layer was 40' thick for miles in every direction!





I could only manage 4 Starry Rocks and a few sculpin.  I couldn't remember if the sculpin were open or not, so I just tossed them back.  I didn't want to deal with those prickly bastards anyway.

Tails Up!  hahahaha



I snagged 3 tuna crab when I switched to the little megabait to try and salvage anything!



I threw irons for hours and not a single yellow.  I ran all the way up to Torrey Pines looking for some breezers, but found nothing but whales and dolphin.  I had to get back, so I made the long run and then my motor started buzzing from over heating!  WTF!?!?  I tried several times to get it running, to no avail.  i finally tilted it up to see if anything was blocking the intake and saw nothing.  I put the motor back down and bam... ran fine.  Not sure if trimming the motor flushed out the obstruction or not, but it magically worked again.

I literally just stopped on a random spot just about a stones throw from the inlet when I saw a ton of fish on the finder.

All I was doing was casting the megabait with a small squid strip and it was only dropping 20 feet before getting slammed!  All nice sized whitefish!  They were swarming!  Since I was catching them so shallow, I was culling them in the livewell.  I must have caught 24 in just about 30 minutes!  Well that all worked out and got my limit of bottom critters.  I also caught Johnny Bass, and some whopper rattlesnakes!



So I get home with the boat and I can't get the boat trailer to go in reverse.  I was stuck in my neighbor's driveway as the wheels would not go in reverse.  I forced the issue so I could drive on the sidewalk just to get out of there.  After closer inspection, I realize my cap is almost off and won't go back on.  I finally had it and called up East County Trailer Repair since they do mobile repairs and talked to one of the guys.  He was super helpful and had me try a few things first to save me a few hundred dollars.  Damn... It did the trick!  I'm not used to people in business going out of their way to help you out for free when they could have made a killing on me.  Much respect to them!

http://www.ectrailerrepair.com/

Well, that's it.  A good and bad day all mixed up into one.

[Pinoyfisher]

That's a sweet whitefish pic! Always fancied them whitefish. I heard a month ago that the tuna crab were moving in, sweet to know it's really happening. Shaping up to be an pretty good fishing season.

[vdisney]

Frick'n bummer about the overheating issue, let's hope it was a fluke.  I'm getting used to reading your "trouble free" boat reports Tom, let's keep it that way