In talking with other lure whippers and oama dunkers, and from my own experience, the papio season has been red hot in the last few weeks.  Larger than normal papio were being caught inside the reef, some even reaching small ulua status.

With high hopes, I fished two previously productive oama whipping spots this week with Jason, who normally whips plastic grubs, Waxwings and other hard plugs.  The first spot’s calm inshore area was a strange tea color.   Just last week it was loaded with hungry whites.  The bite on the dead oamas was very slow and only kaku were hitting far inside of the break.  Jason ended up with a couple 15 – 20 inch kaku and I just had gouged and cut off baits to show.  Convinced the papio had to be around somewhere I inched closer and closer to the waves and got splashed up to my cap multiple times.  My waterproof bag proved to be not so waterproof when I had it opened to get more bait, and I ended up soaking my main reel and backup reel.

The following day, after taking apart both reels and lubing them  with anti-corrosion lube, we hit a spot that had been red hot last week.  The inshore protected areas were tinged brown like yesterday’s spot.  An 8 inch omilu hit my first dead oama so things were looking up.  But for the next hour or so, small papio nipped and pulled off the oama baits, a larger papio took drag and unbuttoned and we were inching closer and closer to the impact zone.   I was tripped up twice in surgy water, falling head first in waist deep water with my rod in my hand.  The first time I fell so suddenly my neck felt like I had whiplash and I had to massage out the tight muscles. I had never fallen wading to the break before; what the heck has been going on these last two days?  Guess I’ll be finding out how good the anti-corrosion lube is.

Where did all the larger oama-eating papio go?  Jason switched to plastic grubs and caught a few small omilu but even they were fairly scarce.  Did the season come to a sudden end or did something else cause the predators to stop chewing?