Mother's Day Miracle (5/14)

[Latimeria]

Well, not quite.  I had a few open hours in the morning to fish before taking my girls to brunch for Mother's Day.  I was determined to get a corvina on the topwater,

I get down to a damn bike race that closed the island, so I had to park quite a way from where I wanted to fish, but did so and took the hike.

I made about 300 casts and had 3 pops on my spook in that time!  Nothing stuck, and I'm suspect that one of them might have been a needlefish.  The other two seemed more like my target species. 
I switched from the spook, to a jerk bait.  I made about 50 casts on that and all it did was grab every loose piece of salad in the water.

I pretty much admitted defeat and was walking back to the truck, when I saw all of these ~12" halibut slamming and flopping on bait!  It was pretty awesome to see!  I clipped on an underspin since it was about the size of the bait in the water and on the first cast, it went ripping out!  Now my heart was pumping a little thinking I might have gotten momma in the middle of that mix!

After about 10 minutes, I got my first view of it... sideways halibut... Ugh..





Hook was right where they usually are on a butterfly ray and about a few inches from the mouth and right near the nose...

10# test so I didn't want to pull on the line, but finally got get to shore.  Whew!  What a big one and especially for my bay bass rod!



That damn underspin was hooked good, but here what this monster went for....



Anyway, I decided that was the last cast, so watched her swim off and I was on the road to get home and cleaned up from all that toxic mud it threw all over me!  LOL



Thanks for reading and until next tide!

[Dark_Knight_9C1]

Wow! Huge butterfly ray. Looked well over 3ft across. Nice catch. At least you got to pull on something. And on 10 lb test no less.

-Keith

[Latimeria]

Wow! Huge butterfly ray. Looked well over 3ft across. Nice catch. At least you got to pull on something. And on 10 lb test no less.

-Keith

Yeah, she was definitely in the 40's.  I think I've pretty much got the big 3 rays all on my small bass gear now while casting lures. 

[Tim524]

I know the smell of the toxic mud all too well 

[vdisney]

I clipped on an underspin since it was about the size of the bait in the water and on the first cast, it went ripping out!  Now my heart was pumping a little thinking I might have gotten momma in the middle of that mix!

That must have got your heart pumping!!

[jrodda]

That is wild.

Now you got me thinking maybe I should count the pelagic ray I hooked on the nose with a cedar plug last summer for my species list.

[Latimeria]

That is wild.

Now you got me thinking maybe I should count the pelagic ray I hooked on the nose with a cedar plug last summer for my species list.

That's good in my book.