Pacific Queen

Went fishing this weekend with a long time friend of mine, Todd. Yellowtail season has been on for a while and Albacore and Tuna are starting to heat up. So we decide to find a boat for a day & and half trip. That is where you leave at night, start fishing in the morning, head back that night, and wake up at the dock the next morning.

The only openings we could find were on the Pacific Queen out of Fisherman's Landing. Not a bad boat, but not a great boat either.

Our journey begins on Friday at around 3:00pm. I leave my house and head to Scripps Ranch to pick up Todd. Traffic SUCKS! It takes an hour and a half to get to Todd's. Fortunately the game is on, Angels game that is.

I pick up Todd, say "Hi" to Teresa and their three kids - she gets them all weekend. All three kids are under seven years old. I digress. We load up and head out. More traffic. For some reason we had to be at the dock an hour earlier that was originally scheduled, more on this later. To find a parking spot at Fisherman's Landing, you want to get there about the time the day boats are coming back, which of course we do.

We check in at the landing an decide to get something to eat. Some italian/pizza place near the landing. Food, ok, but over priced. Good beer, crappy service. Place sucked so bad I forget the name.

Finish dinner, pay the bill, and grab our gear. Head to the boat, find our bunk and wait. And wait, and wait, and wait. We find out that we are not heading as far south as we thought we were going to be heading (50 miles south instead of 100 miles south) so we don't have to leave early now. I finish listening to my game on XM Radio - Angels win! We finally leave the dock around 9:00 pm or pretty close to that.

I read some for school, have a beer, and try and get some sleep. The bunks where designed for pygmies. 6 feet long (maybe a little more) and my shoulder with apart. The boat is way tippy so trying to sleep and keep yourself in the bunk at the same time is tricky. Todd is screwed. At at 5 feet 18 inches (as he likes to refer to himself), the bunk is far from acceptable.

5:00 AM people are up. I get some coffeee, we are stuck in fog, pea soup fog. Not good. Fog makes it difficult to find the kelp patties that the fish like to congrgate around. We head out looking for sun, trolling along the way. We catch some fish, actually we catch quit a few -Yellowtail and Bonita.

We spend the morning trolling and stopping, catching fish. Now here is the problem. On the day & half boats, you get the yahoo's that don't know how to fish. They cast over you, don't move down the drift line following their bait, they don't get out of the way when you have a fish on...

But what really pissed me off, was the deck hands that could not gaf a fish. WTF? I caught 8 fish that day, I brought home 5. Three fish lost to miss gafs.

So the afternoon comes, the fishing slows, and I decide to take a nap. Every once in a while you hear "Fish On". One of the four troller's hooked a fish, turns out they were all bonita, we were looking for Yellowtail and Albacore.

Late afternoon arrives and I wake from my slumber, the best sleep I have had. We get into a couple of more bites, have a pretty good time. We are about 40-50 miles from home as the sun sets and our fishing day concludes.

Captain informs us that we can not go back to the dock early because the landing will not let them in. OK, that is complete B.S. we could have been back at 12:00am I could have been home at 2 and in my bed. Nope another night at the Crappy Bunk Inn.

Next morning, I get up, the deck hands are cleaning fish. I ask who won the jackpot (who got the biggest fish and gets my 10 dollars?) they do not know yet. I ask well, why are they cleanning fish if they do not have the jackpot fish figured out yet? Oh, they are going to weigh the fish when they get to the dock. ??? What??? Turns out someone screwed up, big. They only fish that got weighed were the fish that were not being cleaned. I had my fish cleaned, I got screwed.

So all in all good day fishing, but the Pacfic Queen had three strike outs.