Almost 2 weeks ago we made the prediction that oama would start coming into the south shore oama spots over the next few weeks, and be catchable by the end of July. We also said that papio would hitting the oama piles hard by mid-August, and be catchable with oama. Well, that turned out to be accurate and a little conservative.
A day or so after we posted that, we got reports of newly arrived oama being spotted in growing numbers, and by late last week they were biting pretty well. We held off on announcing this to give the early oama fishers first crack at oama that haven’t learned to avoid human interaction. The daytime oama predators have been showing up and mugging the schools so looks like the season is ON!
I checked my early season oama spot last week and there was a small school of newly arrived oama that were very skittish. 6 to 8 inch Moose oama came to the palu so I targeted them instead and got 4. I prefer the Moose over the small oama, to drop live in the deep with my kayak. Problem is the Moose aren’t eating in captivity yet. I guess I gotta catch a few easily trained oama babies to teach the Moose to eat.