The blue marlin bite is ON and tops June as the most common catch. While most of them are small @ less than 200lbs., as is typical for this time of year, some of the bigger females have already started to show up. If you’re a regular follower of my reports you know that the current speed and direction turns the bite on or off here and the current has been funky all month long. There’s been a North / South split way on the outside of the harbor and different one on the inside. Sometimes it’s been pulling straight in in-between. Up on “The Grounds” outside the airport it’s been back and forth changing day to day and even switching during the day. In spite of all of that, the offshore bite remains pretty good. More on that later.
Spearfish comes in at second place for the most common catch for June. While they tend to hit smaller lures than the ones we troll for marlin, the marlin will sometimes go after the smallest lure in the pattern. Because of that, I lost some of my best spearfish lures this month. I use light leader for the spearfish but it’s usually not strong enough for the 150 to 200 pound marlin. Dang! It’s hard to replace a good catching spearfish lure. The ahi bite slowed down too. Even the smaller ones on the FAD’s but that wishy-washy current on “The Grounds” has been holding otaru tunas. They normally show up in the late summer but they’re here now. The ono bite really shut off this month. Like I said, the offshore bite is pretty good but we had some high surf come in a few weeks ago and the shoreline waters got pretty murky so the ono moved offshore. The ono usually prefer to feed in 40 to 60 fathoms of water and here and in Kona, that is our inshore fishing. Just one mile or less from shore. In case you don’t know how much a fathom is, I’ll save you the Google and tell you that 1 fathom is 6 feet. It gets deep quick here.
Because of the high surf my bottom fishing spots got murky too. The surf calmed back down and the shoreline has since cleared up but the near shore fish haven’t returned yet.
What else hasn’t returned this summer is the tourists. It’s really slow right now and there are very few boats going out. On a charter last Tuesday not long after I left the harbor, my customers asked “Are we the only ones out here today?” I looked all over and finally spotted just one other boat way offshore. Its summer now and there should be at least 50+ boats a day going out but that’s not happening. My guess is that we were lied to and the “Great Recession” isn’t over after all.
