BY JEREMY SWINGLEY JR.
Special to Western Outdoor News
SAN DIEGO— My uncle, my dad and I made our fifth run to the islands last Saturday, and we’ve really been grinding this year trying to put good quality fish on the boat. We fished all morning hard, slow-trolling while trying to find schools and we hooked a decent fish that I didn’t meter, so I think it was a free swimmer solo or in a small school.
My dad landed him and we kept moving, found a school deep and dropped the yo-yo through them. We hooked up on a nice fish, and my dad had fought him for a while but it broke off right as we saw color. My uncle had to be back to the dock by 1, so after that we headed back to Mission Bay.
But after losing that one it was hard to call it a day, and after dropping off my uncle, me and my dad had a long conversation about heading back south and giving it another shot. I was hesitant and discouraged, but my dad was persistent. I really think now that he knew if we kept putting in the hours it would pay off, so we got back down to the islands and started looking for another school that wanted to play along.
Five minutes into looking, I found a school of small fish thatIi thought might have been some calicos or bonito. I threw out a fly-lined sardine to try to find out what I was looking at, and I watched the sardine go out and I kept letting line out. That’s when this yellowtail came up and ate it right off the top.
I saw the swirl and yelled to my dad to get on the motors because this fish was really taking line. He got me into position, and I started winding him in. I have caught a few sizeable yellowtail, but this fish made me think I was out of my league.
After fighting him for 10 minutes and having my dad reposition us two more times, we finally got color and my dad grabbed the gaff. Once he got to the surface, we realized what we had done. My dad made a perfect gaff shot through the gills and pulled him up and over the rail. We hugged and screamed and were so happy with what we had accomplished after the countless boat rides south.
After the hooting and hollering, we bled him, got him into the kill bag and headed for the Dana (landing) scale where we got a weight of 48.2 pounds. We then called our friend, Kelly, at San Diego Fish Processing, dropped the fish off and he reconfirmed the weight. He them cut it up for us into sushi and regular cuts, and told us the head weighed 8 pounds without the collar, the collar weighed four pounds on its own and it is the biggest yellowtail he’s ever had in the shop.
