Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire No Tuna Harmed: Last Trip of the Season. Maybe...

Last trip of the season, at least for this vessel. Headed out of Gloucester (Glawstah) to the happy tuna hunting grounds of Stellwagen hoping for a couple or three last bluefin. These are commercial guys when the season is open but that ended long ago so this was a purely recreational endeavor, which says a lot about how much these boys like killing fish. It was around 34F when we headed out from port. Forecast was for seas 3'-5' with winds NW/NNW at 10-15, building in the early afternoon. Not great conditions, but screw it. Snow's going to fly soon and this boat's getting put up, so what are a couple of serious tuna boys going to do? Fish, naturally.

Before we even cleared the drawbridge we came across a small disabled craft dead in the water. Oh, boy. Tossed a line and dragged the boys back in. Good deed for the day, check.

End result was that we hooked nothing. Bait was insane, and it took around 3 drops with the sabikis to load up the well with more than a dozen nice macks. Dolphins and whales were plentiful to say the least, with some impressive breaching going on. As usual, tons of seabirds, including oldsquaw, a couple flavors of scoter, eider, big gannets, shearwaters and the ubiquitous gulls. As it was raining, hard at times, I didn't pull out a real camera, so phone pics are all I took. We suffered getting 'dogged up', which is a local term meaning that spiny dogfish (a kind of small shark) were taking many of our baits before our target fish had a crack at them. We both drifted and fished off the ball with macks under balloons.

We marked tuna several times, and on our best shot, we watched two red boomerangs speeding up at our baits from depths of around 120'. We thought for sure one of the rods were going to go off, but didn't. Checked baits to find one had been eaten by a small doggie and the other two were crossed. Big tuna don't get big by being dumb. Saw a porbeagle on the surface, and S chucked a jig at the shark, but the fish wasn't having it and returned to the deep never to be seen again. Cousin to the great white, BTW, and delicious.

Anyway, fun was had and thought I'd share a few pics.





F/V Tuna.com in the pic. Those guys and their 'reality' show have done more to hurt the local tuna fishery than many understand.







Clearing the breakers in Gloucester harbor.

Dart at the head of a harpoon. Nothing to pin it to on this outing, but has been attached to literally, many, many tons of giants. Maybe get one or two trips in this season with other buds, but we'll see. The fish will be here, just not with the conditions that many are willing to brave to get a crack at them.

Great pics KG...

We do the opposite in Panama...

Small local homemade boats... Hot as hell... Pacific... Yellowfin...





Mucha cerveza!

Tough run. Better luck next time. Thanks for the pics, those are really cool.

Beautiful boat. You don't see many pilot houses around here but I always thought they were cool.

What's the saying "A bad day of fishing is better than a good day at work."

Thanks for the story and pictures, KG.

Great pics! Got damn. I can smell the water!

Nice pics, too bad about the bite. Nice Parker too, solid built NC boats. We run a little 1800 here at work.

Great pictures. Thanks for sharing them.

Was always curious about how wicked tuna affected the fishing out there. What’s the term they use for non local fisherman? Googins?

Nice Parker. Sorry for no love from the tuna gods.
I commercial fished for Bluefin several years ago.out of Morehead City NC. Sent 7 to Japan. Great way to lose money.
As you know those prices they throw around on TV are just BS.
By the time you take out for the fish house plane ticket to Japan, aution house in Japan. You wind up with about a third of the auction price, and that price depended on the current market.

I was gonna ask him also about the Googin thing??
😄😄😄

I can see how the show would fugg up stuff for others around their.
Mostly by drawing more people to fish for them.

Like how duck dynasty drew out morons to duck hunt who never did before and schit..

More people doing something they never did before type of thing

Depleting the resource and crowding the opportunity in many ways.

Towing a Honda outboard? Hmmm..

.

Heading out to the NE corner. Pretty flat at the time. Didn't look quite like this on the steam back to the barn, but we got in just fine.

Except for a pair of draggers, we were the lone rangers out there. Something always a little eerie being out of sight of land, especially when it gets bumpy, but it's a good kind of eerie.

4.2 Yamaha putting in the work. Pretty easy to tune them up to 330 hp if warranty is out or if you aren't worried about such. I have the old 3.3L 250 so no love on that end for me.

Nothing wrong with that. Looks like a blast with great numbers of fish. Do they not believe in coolers or icing fish, though?

Googan isn't really about where a guy's from. It really means a guy out on the water who doesn't know what he's doing and creates problems for others. They ignore unwritten laws about the fishery, running over lobster pots and putting down breaking fish by blasting up at them willy nilly. You don't approach another boat in the fleet that's on a fish, or mugging an already anchored vessel by setting the hook right next door. Getting within say, a quarter mile--at least--of another boat is kind of taboo, that kind of stuff.

A typical Googan is a rich guy who's seen WT and decided he wants in on the action too. Said Googan buys an expensive boat and all the gear, and only really serves to try to stroke his ego as a fisherman. He heads out with an inexperienced crew, breaks all the rules, yells at everyone around him in person and on the radio and catches nothing. Boat gets sold in two seasons, and is purchased by the next wannabe' WT hero. Rinse, repeat. It gets tired, especially for folks trying to make a living out there.

Thanks to those chiming in. Time to start duck hunting in earnest.

Ha ha! Yeah, we saw that too. Not sure what happened there. We didn't ask. Plus, as those two were speaking Portuguese, our comms were conducted in sign language alone. For all we know they buggered a prop on the rocks (it was dead low as we set out). They sure did appreciate the help though, and that's good enough. You don't ignore a vessel at sea dead ITW or in distress. Not only moral but legal issue, depending. Duty to provide assistance. In yesterday's case, since these guys weren't in any danger at all, we weren't legally obligated. It was just the right thing to do.

When the going gets tough the tough get going. You have to really love it.