Seasonally the white papio, some ulua-sized, school up in the bay for a month or so, and for the last couple of years Frank and I tried to crash their their feeding frenzy party on our paddle watercraft. Each year we couldn’t find them, or they just didn’t want to bite.
We have caught small ones (less than a pound) just as the sun was going down, but never got the bigger ones to bite in the morning. Our boating friend Erik located a big school a few weeks ago, and that was the intel we went on.
Frank and I were on our smaller watercraft since we weren’t going past the breakers. He was on his SUP converted into a sit down kayak style board and I was on my old Scupper Pro kayak. I still had use of my Garmin Echomap fish finder and could see scattered bait and what looked like larger fish spread out in as shallow as 8ft. I dragged sinking swimmers and lead headed jigs through the schools for nada. Frank trolled through them with frozen oama and stopped off a reef edge to throw a popper. As soon as the popper hit the water he was on! The aggressive white taped out at about 11.75 inches. Way to find the biting fish Frank! But the action shut down since it was getting close to 9am.
I slurped the same popper Frank had luck with, over large fish marks but couldn’t get them to wake up. Finally I foul hooked a baby omilu with that popper, on the reef. Almost 2 hrs from Frank’s first fish, in the same general area, he got a surface explosion on his popper I could hear 40 yds away! This was a bigger fish, and went almost 14 inches.
That was all the action we got on poppers. Frank wisely dragged his frozen oama around and released a small omilu and got another white to match his first one. Good thing I have a fishing partner that can catch fish when the fishing gets tough. Without his whites I would have assumed those big blobs on the fish finder’s screen were turtles or something!
So we know the whites were there, it just was too late in the day to get them to frenzy. We’ll start earlier next time!
Nice work, Frank! Sort of random, but do you find the white papios fight different than the omilus? I feel like omilus tend to be more animated during the fight, running back forth with frequent head shakes, while whites tend to pull steadily and sit in the current between run. They are both fun to catch!
Thanks Jason. I catch more omilus than whites but I did find the white papios fight harder and like you said they pull steadily. I had a harder time getting them in the net. The one that took the oama while trolling really slammed the pole .
I had to tighten the drag so it wouldn’t run in a hole in the reef.
You right about both being fun to catch. Aloha!
Frank! Nice catches! I enjoy seeing your posts about your modded paddle board. Id love to see a small how to on how you outfitted your board!!! Again, nice catches!!!