I finally have a story to tell. I've been hooking into some large fish with poor results for some time now. The hook has been pulling out. Haven't been breaking lines. I sometimes wonder if braid and flouro doesn't have enough give to it. Ran into a new friend at the launch. He got to see me earn my name as a wave crashed over me on takeoff. We got out and sloooowly made bait. All I was getting were spanish macs and smelt. Then some sardines showed up.
I dragged some sardines around for awhile and got discouraged. Told my new friend I'd see him later and headed for deeper water. In about 90 feet of water, something hit a trolled sardine and took me for a ride. I fought it for around 40 minutes and couldn't get it closer than 38 ft from the yak according to the fishfider, at which time it would head straight back to the bottom. I was taking my time, did have the drag really tight and keeping a lot of pressure on the fish. I thought the dry spell was over. Not! The hook came unbuttoned. What a terrible feeling.
I then continued to deeper water with more trolled sardines and decided to drift back to shore and call it a day. Caught an 18.5 in calico on the troll and released it. After a sea lion robbed me of my last dine I went to play around in the kelp for awhile. I tied off to a stringer and was tossing some plastics. After about half an hour the water erupted around me with about 20 crashing fish and birds diving everywhere. I thought it was a school of barries. I tied on a jig and tossed it out. They weren't barries. I got a nice yellowtail 39 inch fork length. Funny thing, it was on my plastics rod which was spooled with mono, no braid or fluoro. Hmmm...
