Monday, August 9, 2010

American Angler 5-Day Trip (July 27 - Aug 1, 2010)

The annual Harry and Roger 5-day trip on the American Angler was skippered by Brian Kiyohara. The majority of the passengers are part of two charter groups that were combined several years ago. These guys have the reputation of the most rods in rocket launchers. We turned left at the point with a fantastic load of sardines. On the first day of fishing we were looking for tuna off shore around 130 miles south of San Diego. Our first hook-up was on a kelp paddy. It was a good luck, bad luck, good luck situation. I hooked the first fish of the trip (good luck), a miss-step due to the rough seas resulted in my rod and reel going overboard with the yellowtail on the hook (bad luck), but 2nd ticket Ray took over Tony Contreras’ rod and snagged the line of my lost rod and reel (good luck). Besides getting my Accurate BX2-500N and custom rod back I also got the yellowtail on the boat.


For his role in retrieving my rod and reel from the lost depths of the ocean, the fish gods rewarded Tony Contreras with a first place jackpot fish. Tony hooked and landed a 126 lb Opah (moon fish). Since this was the only fish hooked at that time, Tony had a paparazzi of spectators with cameras recording his catch. Here is my photo of Tony.


The second day of fishing was at the Cedros for yellowtails. We were able to catch nice size yellows the entire day. Ben Kawata caught the largest yellowtail at 33 lbs and Gordon Toguchi got the 3rd place 29 lb yellowtail. We had so much fun that we all

had trip limits in one day. Since the weather was bad and the tuna fishing not promising, we elected to catch a stringer of reds on the 3rd morning. That afternoon and on the last day of fishing we looked offshore for tuna. The weather improved greatly but the albacore fishing did not. We got a couple of Albacore for our efforts. All the passengers had a great time and great service from the American Angler crew. We can’t wait for next year when we do it again.


As for the reel that went for a swim, I fished the Accurate BX2-500N for the rest of the trip with no

change in performance and took it all apart after I got home. I thoroughly cleaned the drag washers, dried out the internal parts, lubed and reassembled the reel. The reel is ready to go fishing again.


Thanks for checking out my blog,

Gary Teraoka Pro Staff for Accurate Reels and Izorline

at

2 comments:

  1. Bob LAugust 16, 2010 at 7:32 AM

    Gary,

    You mention that the nub should go up into the spectra 3-5 inches. I am having great difficulty getting it up that far. Any suggestions?

    Thanks.

    Bob

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gary TeraokaAugust 17, 2010 at 9:36 PM

    Hi Bob,
    Thanks for looking at my blog. Let me make sure you understand where the nub is suppose to be attached. The nub needs to be attached to the mono around 3 feet from the end of the mono. The 3 ft is the length you are going to insert the mono into the hollow spectra. You need to insert the mono into the spectra far enough that the nub is 3 to 5 inches inside of the hollow spectra. The size of the spectra relative to the size of the mono can make this easy or difficult. Would you mind telling me what size mono and what size and brand of hollow spectra you are trying to connect? For COWs, I use 135# Izorline First String mono into 200# Izorline spectra. (This is easy to insert the nub). For 100# Izroline fluorocarbon, I insert it into Izorline 135# hollow spectra. This is a little more difficult and takes some skill so you can just use 200# spectra and not deal with this difficulty. The nub connection will hold up fine if you insert the mono into the spectra 3 ft or more. I hope I guessed correctly to cover some of your question.

    Thanks for our comment,
    Gary

    ReplyDelete