Hatteras Fishing Report

I had the opportunity to get down for a day of Bluefin Fishing with Capt. Darrin and Timmy. I had hoped to fish two days, but the weather lined up for one. The weather was absolutely perfect yesterday. Sunny, light breeze out of the east, couldn't have asked for better conditions. We steamed about 22 miles and put em in. Didn't take long and we had a few bites, and released a few false albacore, and things looked pretty good. There was no real hard edge today, which had us a bit concerned, but the bait and life was pretty much right where it had been on Sunday (the last time anyone was out).

Soon we had another bite and this time, it was the real thing. Chad jumped in the chair and brought the fish to boat side in short order and we decided to roll the dice and release the 80-90 pounder, in hopes of upgrading. Back up on the troll, we couldn't get another bite right away and after a bit switched over to chunking and jigging for a while. We were marking good bait, blackfins, AJ's, all sorts of stuff and it all looked right. The jigs produced nice Blackfin Tuna and AJ's and provided plenty of action, but we couldn't get the Bluefin Bite on them. At one point, Darrin up in the bridge yells down, "they're rolling right on top behind us". Timmy quickly free lines out our live mullet that was pre-rigged an on "standby" in the livewell. 10 seconds is all it took, before it was inhaled and it was game on for Bob. The fish was also brought to the boat quickly. This one turned out to be a nice 66 inch fish and we put it in the boat.

We got back up on our spot, and Rick jumped in the water to check things out. He said he immediately saw Bluefin coming up into our chunk slick (although they were not eating the chunks). He said they were coming to check things out, but not really holding. They vanished back down into the deep... We worked that area for a while more, then picked up and ran down to the rest of the fleet that had a little bite going on about 4 miles below us. We put em back out and after another 30 minutes or so, came tight on our 3rd fish of the day, which Darren brought quickly to boat side. We snapped a couple pictures and released the 90# class fish. We trolled the area, jigged some more, caught some more blackfin, but just couldn't get over top of them again. They were there...we kept marking em, but they didn't seem to want to eat really good. I believe Andy on the good times had a triple right in that area, and it certainly felt like we could have got covered up at any time. We tried some more live-baiting at the end of the day, and called it a wrap and enjoyed a great ride in. Great day on the water in Hatteras in the middle of February!