It’s beginning to look a lot like …… Summer!? If I didn’t have a calendar, the ocean would be telling me that it’s summer already. One summer indicator is the birds. Shearwaters are the most common sea bird we have here but in the winter, they are pretty scarce. We normally only see big piles of shearwaters along with terns and frigates feeding in the summer months. In the later summer months we also see the really big skipjack tunas called “otado” or “otaru” feeding with them. That’s exactly what’s been going on for over a week now. Another summer indicator is an increased blue marlin bite. It’s usually the smaller 150 to 200 pounders that show up in the early summer first and they’re biting right now too. Yet another summer indicator is a good ono bite. The ono bite has been as good as any summer month since the middle of April. It’s supposed to be mahi mahi season right now but there haven’t been a whole lot of those around.The spearfish bite should be outnumbering the marlin bite this time of year but it’s the other way around recently. And just to top it off, yellowfin tuna in the “koa(s)”. Certain near shore spots where the bottom terrain and abundance of food attract the medium size yellowfin tunas have been producing.
I did mention in last month’s report that the striped marlin bite would probably remain pretty good for April because they showed up late in the season and it was. The ahi bite in the porpoise schools remained about the same. Now I’m wondering about the “blind strike” yellowfin bite. It usually starts around the middle of May and lasts through the summer. I’ve written about the “blind strike” yellowfin before so if you’re one of my regular readers (more than 10,000 of you) you know that just a couple of years ago, blind strike yellowfin became a year-round event. It hasn’t been as common this year so I’m figuring that during this next month, we’ll probably start seeing more blind strikes happening.
The beginning of the month was pretty good for bottom fishing but with the ono and otaru bite being so good for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending most of my hours on the water targeting those instead. Summer tends to get a little slow for the bottom bite anyway and even though it’s not really summer yet, as long as the ocean conditions say it is, I’ll pretend it is too.
