I’ve been correlating Solar Lunar bite times with my catches and the action has seemed to be much better during those periods. Last week, the New Moon fell on a rare June light wind day and I planned to fish the 12:00pm to 2:30pm major bite time to see how good it could be.

The water was so calm at 9am that the bite was initially slow on the damashi rigged with Completely Hooked Lures Minnows but I landed a chunky toau (blacktail snapper) and some baby uku before getting the rig got busted up. I was surprised to bring up an opelu in the blind and moved up from the 12lb damashi rig to 15lb, and trolled the live opelu with a 2oz weight out to 220ft.

Something took the opelu and pulled line for about 20 seconds before releasing the bait. What came back was from a horror movie; a headless opelu stripped of its skin, hooked on the rear hook.

What could suck the head and skin off and not get hooked? Since the remains looked like a skinned opelu fillet, I dropped it back down and something slurped it up and eventually rocked me.

The frozen akule I put down was ignored, so I dropped the 15lb damashi rig on a good mark in 200ft. It got picked up and busted off so I upgraded to the heaviest rig I had, a 25lb rig. At that point the major bite period was starting so I dropped that 3 hook rig down with high hopes and something heavy and strong for the light jig rod pulled some drag and bent the rod. What came up was a 3.5lb white papio and 2 fat taape (blueline snapper). The bite slowed in the deep and I wanted to see how good the shallow bite at 100ft was, so I made my way back in.

The 25lb damashi rig wasn’t scaring off the fish, and an uku and weke nono aka weke ula came up together on one drop. But even that damashi rig got busted off.

Here’s some highlights of the damashi action.

Since bigger fish were hitting, I tied a 60g green/gold jig to what normally is a damashi setup and dropped it to the bottom. A couple lifts and bam, a spirited weke nono was on. As long as I was dropping on an “active mark” (a sonar mark indicating moving predator fish), the jig got bit. The fish were still biting at 3pm and it was hard to leave the best jig bite I’ve experienced but I still had 2.5 miles to travel so I cranked up my Bixpy motor and headed in.

Here’s some highlights of the jig action. Major bite time on a New Moon is legit!