Winter season is fast approaching. Wind on the Southside has been variable at times, and the south swell has been down. The drive and paddle distance is much shorter for me than the productive Eastside, but often I just get my baits stripped while dodging boats.

The weather during the first trip back was so calm that the fish were very wary, but eventually I found small, dumb fish to bite the hooks. A small uku managed to eat a frozen opelu, then a bunch of weke nono up to 1.5lb came up on the damashi. The most exciting thing was having an even smaller uku pounce on the falling 60g tungsten jig. I kept that fish to see what it was feeding on, and sure enough it had an oama in its belly that hadn’t made it into the shallows. Match the hatch baby!

The following week I picked another very calm day and again, the fish were wary and didn’t take take the baits wholeheartedly. I had a lot of baits raked or pulled off and even had the back hook cut off twice!

This bait was picked up and the fish ran with it for a few seconds before dropping it. You can see the jaw pattern of the fish.

Shea on the Big Island advised me to run wire leader which I had never used before. I ordered some Knot2Kinky titanium leader and watched his video on how he ties his rigs for ono.

This past week, the wind was texturizing the water enough to get better bites. My first bait was sliced through fairly cleanly, and the next bait had its back hook got cut off so I put on the Knot2Kinky stinger hook as Shea recommended. Got nibbled on, then the fish realized it couldn’t cut itself free so it took off for the deep. More than 300yd of line was pulled off a pretty heavy drag in 90 seconds and I had to almost lock the drag down to try to stop the fish. On the next surge the fluorocarbon knot pulled. The water was so choppy at this point for the fish to pull my kayak easily, shucks!

After analyzing the video, the consensus is that the mystery fish was a big shibi (yellowfin tuna under 100lb) and in fact two shibi were hooked in that area by another kayak fisherman.

I was bummed to lose such an awesome fish but in hindsight, the conditions weren’t safe for me to fight and land something of that size. So, my last two trips to the South resulted in no fish landed but I guess I have to try again, with the aid of the titanium rig.