Finally, a small break in the rain and wind. Normally, fishing after a cold front is not too productive, but it’s been a month and a half since the last kayak outing and I was going nuts. The guys weren’t able to join me so this would be a solo expedition to learn more about the area we’ve fished the last 2 times. I brought Guy’s secret damashi bait he uses and brought my underwater GoPro rig to really see what the Garmin Echomap 44CV Plus was marking.

At about 18ft deep there were a lot of marks that looked like a scattered school of bait fish.

I lowered the GoPro and expected it to record fish spread out all over the place but instead there were these air bubbles! Is that what the fish finder has been marking? Look how murky it was.

At 100ft, I marked reef fish on the bottom and dropped the GoPro down. Very few fish showed on the video and it was still very murky that far from shore.

I’m beginning to think a lot of the marks I’m seeing on the fish finder are fish being marked more than once as they remain under the fish finder’s “cone”.

Time to fish! The baited damashi was lowered and a keeper moana came up on the first drop. It was a little too big to use for bait so I brained it with my “iki spike” and put it in the fish bag. Turns out that was the only fish I brought home. 🙁

I eventually caught a smaller moana that I put down live and nothing took it. I set that moana free with two superficial wounds and put down a frozen opelu. After a long time the bait stealers picked it apart.

On this slow day, the biggest fish landed was a table boss (a’awa) that was foul hooked in the cheek on the damashi and felt like something much better. It was shaken off and set free.

I slow trolled a frozen opelu on the way in that got picked up. Something ran for a few seconds, then dropped the opelu. A second later it got heavy and I started cranking in what felt like a 5lb weight. Then the weight released and a small tako came up! I’m thinking a fish pulled off the body of the opelu (notice that the head is left on the top hook) and the tako lunged for the head but got hooked by the rear hook. It tried to latch onto a rock and eventually dropped that rock. I was trying to figure out how I’d unhook it without it climbing all over me, but the little guy did a Spider Man swing to the side of the kayak, shook off the hook and disappeared.

Very slow day of fishing. Nothing touched the compact tungsten jig either. I think the predator fish didn’t want to deal with the murky conditions and were hunting in cleaner water.

Side Note: The little compact ExpertPower Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) battery I mentioned a few posts ago hardly lost any juice after the 6+ hours of fishing. It started at 13.5 V and ended with 13.0 V. Light, lasts long and was really inexpensive. Almost too good to be true. If you missed that post you can read it here.