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.