Some of the trophy oama I caught just two days ago started to die from some form of ich. To salvage what I had, I took a mix of 3 large and 3 small oama out for a troll. My favorite spot that has always seemed to be in a wind break was funneling the NNE winds through the valley today and diagonally out to sea. Paddling through the chop and slop was really tough, and to add to my misery it started to rain hard for a while. The only thing missing from the perfect storm were waves to capsize me. It actually got kind of scary when I realized I was paddling toward shore for a really long time and not making much progress. A stand up paddler was lying down and trying to make it back to land in as least a wind resistant manner also.
Usually these kind of conditions just make it hard to rig up and paddle but don’t normally affect the bite. Today something put the fish off their feed. After paddling for almost 2 hours I just had one strike that came off. First I thought the jumbo sized oama was scaring the predators but even a peanut oama went untouched. The only winners today were the 3 oama I set free.
I’m really hoping the papio season didn’t suddenly end and instead, the cause of the poor fishing was the drop in barometric pressure due to the storm. I need to blame something for this goose egg.
[…] determine if the yesterday’s slow fishing was due to the incoming storm or, ugh, the end of the summer papio season, I went back […]