It finally came! The lure fishing season off of a boat!! And the target fish is… not a Bonito, still a little early for that. The water temperature increased from last week and it has been a nice and sunny weather. It will be my very first attack for some Barracuda this year off the coast of Newport. From 3 days ago, it’s been decreasing from 200, 100, to 50 Barracuda catches, but I wonder what will happen on this 4th day of fishing? I brought the new “Bigup” lure send to me from Japan as well as the usual FM130MR & FM110. I carefully selected my lures so even if the Barracuda migrates to the outer surface or the middle area, I will be able to aim it at any depth. And because the weather didn’t look too good in the morning and was very cloudy, I brought gold, green, and white color lures. Barracudas have small mouths so it makes it difficult to adjust retrieving. So sometimes I would have to stop retrieving and basically continue to do a stop-and-go action and immediately resume casting… I continued this for 2 hours, but had no bites at all including all the other fishermen (with live baits) around me……. Nothing in the outer surface or middle area!! Then the captain announced, “Since there are no Barracudas today, we will change our target fish to Scorpionfish & Sanddab”. I had to give up on fishing my very first Barracuda of this year…

We changed locations to the fishing spot we have been previously, where we were able to catch a lot of Scorpions before. I didn’t have a jig prepared, so I made a loop previously taught by Brent (positioned at 15cm from the weight) with an 8 oz weight and started fishing. There was only 30min left and I was getting ready to catch nothing today, but then I moved to the other side of the boat and… I caught 7 in a row!! It wasn’t a Scorpion, but I caught some Sanddub and Whitefish and my day of fishing ended. This is some additional information, but a small-scaled shark was caught also, but since it wasn’t a big fish nor a target fish, it had to be released. But it was so powerful, pulling and tumbling, it was a very good fight! Since the fishing result wasn’t so good, the captain insisted us to take home some Sardine used for bait, so I took some home.

Sandy
The Daily Flash Minnow

P.S. The Sanddub I fished today was cooked for my son’s 100th day birthday (a Japanese tradition). My family was very happy! Dad did it!!!