For the second straight week the winds were very light. I picked a day during the work week that was forecast to be windier than the rest, 8 to 12 mph, and it paid off. The boat traffic from the previous week was non-existent. Unfortunately I had run my Bixpy electric motor into shallow sand when I launched and it was turning itself off. Only after returning did I fix the problem; the power cable wasn’t attached properly and the fail safe system was preventing it from shorting.

Because I was without the use of the motor, I stayed within 70ft deep knowing the winds would eventually kick up. The water had dropped a degree from last week to 74.5. Decided to just see what would hit the CHL Minnows on the damashi in clear water. It initially was slow, like in last week’s glassy conditions, so I put a strip of kawakawa on and that turned things around. Taape, toau, and hagi were coming up, and when I took the bait off and just used the soft plastics, moana bit and continued to bite. That led me to believe that boat traffic on very calm days does shut down the bite.

I used a plastic pasta noodle container as a poor man’s bait tube, refreshing the water every so often, and the moana were no worse for wear. With the damashi reef fish test over I wanted to see how live moana would work in the shallows. Not so good, the moana just had its stomach ripped out, and nothing else took it. I let the other moana go.

Next up was a frozen halalu, and that just had its eyes and stomach removed. Hmm… maybe there were only bait stealers in the shallows? I didn’t want to waste my precious frozen opelu so I kept paddling against the current (man was I missing my motor) , and came across a school of opelu I could see from the surface! Unfortunately they didn’t want to bite but I saw what looked like predators cruising the edges of the school.

So I lowered a frozen opelu to the bottom, raised it up 20ft or so and felt the hard taps. Eventually line pulled out and a very jerky battle began. The water was still glassy at this point.

I could not believe how blessed I was to catch a 4.5lb uku at 60ft! Are they always this shallow but just don’t bite when the boaters and divers are churning up the water? I put down another opelu after paddling back to the spot (man, I miss that motor!), and had a smaller uku rip it off. By then, the wind was pushing me west so it was time to paddle in unassisted. Did I say I missed my motor? Nothing hit the 3rd opelu on the way in.

The uku turned out to be a male preparing to spawn in a few months, and that made it nice and oily on the sashimi plate. Gotta love the shallow water winter-time uku!