Bait and Predator report – First Week of October 2019

October 4, 2019 By Scott 14 Comments

There’s a new wave of small oama in some holdout spots but few oama anglers are after them, and those that have been chasing papio with lures and oama are having to put in much more time to get a decent one.

Halalu have left most spots, and comparing to the last 2 yrs, a lot of traditional spots came up empty.

Even the kaku spots are slow.

These trends seem to support the following theories:

The papio have an internal time table that tells them to check the shallow inshore areas around July and stop checking them near the beginning of September. It could be that there are schools of oama on the reef so the papio don’t have to risk leaving the safety of deeper water.
Halalu numbers are directly tied to the previous year’s amount of rain fall. Last year didn’t have as much rain as the previous 2 years?
Juvenile kaku grow up and feed in the brackish estuaries and are big enough by the fall to leave the shallow water and start feeding on bait fish schools like opelu. The next crop of juvenile kaku show up in late Winter. There are always hold over kaku but there are less of them than in the period from late Winter to Fall.

If you haven’t voted in the “How’s your papio season going so far?” poll, please do. We’ll summarize the results in a week or so.

Oama and predator report – Sept 2019

September 6, 2019 By Scott 4 Comments

Haven’t been getting oama reports lately and haven’t seen guys fishing the popular spots so when my friend David said he was gonna be doing some late season oama fishing, that was enough motivation to get me to check the grounds.

David had the school to himself when I arrived and the oama were 5 to 5.5″ fish with that light green color that indicated that they’d be sticking in the shallows for a while. The school size was larger than we could see from where we stood, and David had no problem getting them to eat his variety of baits. If Tina is the Oama Psychologist, David is the Oama Technologist. He loves to tweak his equipment, baits and technique to improve his catch ratio and level of enjoyment. Here’s David landing an oama with the DIY snag-free net he wrote about earlier.

I didn’t see any predators around the oama pile so I whipped the deeper water, covering a lot of ground with the Shimano Shallow Assassin with “Flash Boost” (4 inches long), but nothing was interested. I returned to shore to find the tide was a little too low on the flats and the 1 ft deep water was lined with broken pieces of limu. But there were very small iao jumping once in a while so something was hunting them. The trick was to cast lightly and hold the rod tip up so the Shallow Assassin would stay on the surface and not latch onto any limu.

15 ft in front of me the water erupted and I was tight to a fish that was taking some drag! I could see it’s silhouette because the water was so shallow, and thought it might be an oio. After a few short dashes I got a better view and realized it was a kaku putting up a spirited fight in very shallow water.

I didn’t measure it but was bigger than the small kaku I normally catch in that spot. Looks like it tried to bite the tail off the lure and it was a little tricky to extricate 2 of the 3 barbs of the treble hook to release the fish.

I walked the shoreline, casting into a foot or two of water and eventually got tired of taking limu off the hook. Put on my trusty Shimano Waxwing Baby (2.7 inches long) with rear double hook that ran snag-free and made about 50 casts before the water erupted in an “S” pattern. This was a bigger kaku and I felt it hit the lure but miss the hook. That’s the problem with the upturned double hook. It doesn’t snag limu but also doesn’t hook fish well that hit it from the side.

That ended my slow evening of whipping very shallow water with small swimming lures. Dusk arrived and David had close to a limit of oama in his fanny pack cooler to be served fried crispy for friends later. No one else joined him at the oama school that evening.

It’s the first week of September and the oama are still around in some spots but the fishers and predators seem to have gotten their fill of them and moved on. Guys are still catching papio but further out in deeper water.

Most of the halalu spots have dried up, though there’s still big schools at a few places, and those halalu are being fished hard!

The Shimano Shallow Assassin has never bolo’d. I think it’s the combination of being such a small lure that casts well and swims enticingly. Every time I’ve restocked it in the store it sold out within 2 days. But I’ll be bringing in some other really popular, hard to find JDM lures soon, so please give them a try too!

Halau Season 2: Trips 2 & 3

August 8, 2018 By Scott 4 Comments

The halalu bite was so good the previous day, and the crowd was so excited that I figured I’d better hit the school again before the area was overrun on the weekend. No one could join me so I made my first ever solo halalu expedition. I badly needed to improve my spinning gear casting technique without much of an audience. Since the previous day’s 6 hook damashi snagged too many sardines, and my gear, I cut the damashi set down to 3 hooks. Much easier to cast and unhook.

The pile was closer to shore, in about 4 ft of water and a few guys were casting from the beach side of the pile. I started by whipping the larger CHL Purple Obake Minnow that we fished last year, to minimize sardine bites, on a 6 ft 3lb fluoro leader. I didn’t get any sardines on it but had to fish hard just to catch 3 halalu. Issey, an 8th grade friend of Matt’s, was whipping with a handmade fly and long leader, doing the side jigging thing. When he connected, he’d reel his long leader in, and then grab the last 5 ft with his hand to slide the halalu onto the beach. Issey is a very accomplished halalu slayer, and was catching way more than I was but the bite wasn’t as good as the previous day so I put on the 3 hook damashi. I mostly hooked sardines on the small flies, but began to get more halalu as it got closer to evening. In 2.5 hrs I got 9 halalu. Most of the other guys had given up because of the slow bite.

The next day was Friday, and the crew of young anglers plus a buddy Jon I met through this website a couple years ago, were gonna fish the school hard before the weekend. Jon was the first one there and spent a lot of time finding and following the school until it settled in relatively deep water. The middle school crew of Matt and Hunter were next to Jon when I arrived, and there were two other adult halalu regulars off to the side. I slid in between Matt and Hunter since Hunter was live lining, and started with the 3 hook damashi but only the sardines wanted to bite. Those 3 hooks were prone to snagging someone in the strong winds and Jon told me to use a whipping rig with long leader to be more stealthy so I went back to the CHL Purple Obake Minnow rig. The school moved to deeper water so we had to make a 50 yd cast with the wind. Issey joined his middle school buddies and the pau hana regulars showed up. At times 9 guys were trying to hit the pile. With the strong winds, crossed lines and tangles ensued.

Jon was quietly sand bagging!

Jon was using various colored strips with a long rod, long leader and what looked like a 1 oz egg sinker. He was the high liner by far and quietly stuffed his live bait bucket til it maxed out. Matt hoped he’d get at least 25 halalu and that’s exactly how many he had when he had to leave early. Hunter ended up with more sardines than halalu because he started with a damashi and spent a lot of time live lining baits. Issey had 30 halalu despite his late start.

I just got 12 halalu but got bumped on just about every cast when I could reach the school with my 6’6″ rod. I did get a small kine screamer on the light halalu rig that turned out to be a lai. Issey carefully leadered it for me and Hunter took it home for grinds.

It was fun fishing with friends, but tough to fish in the windy, crowded conditions. I think I’m gonna wait until I hear the school is closer and spread out!