I fished 2 days after the New Moon on the Windward side, which should have been a productive moon phase/tide, and the wind was under 8mph mostly, but there was a weird lumpy rolling East swell and occasional lumps from other directions. With all the surface disturbance, and over cast skies, I would have expected the bite to be phenomenal for bottom fish.

Opelu were at the first stop of the morning, they bit well, and I loaded up with 5. When I dropped the damashi deeper for the good goatfish, there wasn’t much action, which was unusual for the morning. I checked a few more spots before heading deeper to troll the opelu, and they were void too. Nothing hit the live opelu until I dropped it, with a 2.5oz tungsten sliding weight, to the bottom at 150ft.

I hooked something that pulled line initially but came up, which was a good sign. Near that spot was where ulua were wrecking me on the previous trip. Turned out to be a 2lb uku which surprised me because it tried to eat a 10 inch opelu, and punched over its weight class.

Hoping I found the uku honey hole, I dropped another live opelu down and a bigger fish thumped it. The fish pulled line and surged so I was expected a good sized uku, but instead it was a 10lb kahala, probably an almaco/kampachi. I thought about keeping it, but it probably had spaghetti worms and a slight chance of ciguatera so I released it.

Not wanting to battle any more kahala or ulua, I paddled away from the area with another opelu out and ended up over the small opakapaka / weke nono sandy grounds.

I found some but they were too small to keep so I headed back to the shallow bottom fish spots I had checked in the morning.

The bottom fish bite was still extremely slow, with only a few taape, nunu (trumpetfish) and moana hitting. Those are the species that always seem to bite when the better fish don’t. But, big opelu still bit, along with a 1lb kawakawa that came up tail wrapped.

I’m still trying to figure out what caused the fish to have lockjaw, and can only surmise that the larger North swell that rolled through a few days prior moved the food chain out, and the cross swells that day were making things uncomfortable for the fish down there.