Hunting the white papio school via kayak and SUP

After Capt Erik took me around the bay and showed me the possible places the schooling whites could be holding, Frank and I tried to find them via our paddle-powered watercraft.  Unlike the recent boat trips, we launched in the afternoon on a big incoming tide to allow for enough time to get into position before the witching hour started.  The wind decreased from 10 mph down to almost no wind so we were able to cover more ground than usual.

My Garmin 44 CV fish finder/chart plotter marked bigger blobs halfway down the water column in the wide sandy channels, and there were bait balls around but the fish didn’t want to eat for the first 2.5 hrs.  Finally, at 5pm, Frank got got a hit on his frozen oama trolled near the papa’s edge and brought up a legal omilu (he didn’t measure his fish).  He followed that up with a bigger and stronger omilu and it looked like the early eaters were beginning to bite.

I surveyed our favorite papa and marked a lot of bait and what looked like suspended larger fish.  Frank got another hit on his trolled oama but the aha managed to skitter off.  At about 6pm I had something ambush the Waxwing Jr I was retrieving on the reef edge but miss the double hook.  Witching hour was beginning to start.

I tried to emulate Capt Erik’s popping style with a JDM popper that throws a lot of water with just a small tug, but was introducing slack on the spool and backlashing my Shimano Curado 300 EJ. To tighten the line I cast the floating popper and paddled 40 yds away, then carefully pinched the line and popped it back. I could get a good deep gurgle with a side sweep of the rod and didn’t have to worry about backlashing my cast.  On my 3rd attempt at this I got boiled on and hooked a fish!  It was a legitimate 14 inch white papio that I decided to take home so my parents could compare it the menpachi papio they just had.  I wasn’t able to get a good shot on the water shot so this will have to do.

Frank’s fish with his foot in the background. Looks like he needs a larger fish bag so he doesn’t have to bend the fish to get them in!

Just as I was bagging the white, Frank radio’d that he caught a white on his JDM sub-surface lure! That was his first papio whipping with his Shimano Stradic 4000 XHFK and he was stoked!  It was 6:30 at this point and the sun was getting closer to hiding behind the mountains.  We kept at it, and I got another boil on the popper that skittered off the hook like an aha.  I turned my kayak to drift in and was in 6ft of water when I had my last boil. Looked like a small white that couldn’t quite get the hooks in its mouth.  The witching hour was on but we needed to be on land cleaning and racking our watercraft so we bid the biting fish adieu.

Sundown was about 7:15pm on this day and the whites didn’t really start getting active until after 6:30.  So the witching hour probably starts 45 mins before sundown and continues until dark.

After eating the white papio, my dad said he prefers that to the menpachi papio, “although some people may like the darker meat menpachi papio”.  I hadn’t kept a papio in months so maybe he was just appreciating both?