Offshore Virginia Report

Ok,

So it's not a local report and I can't score any points for it. During a business trip to Norfolk this past week, I got the opportunity to fish on my buddy's 25' Grady White out of Rudee Inlet in VA Beach. We left at 4:00AM (no live bait). They typically use rigged ballyhoo which we had. After 2.5 hours of heading east into a 3' wind chop at 25knots, we put the Islander lures with Ballyhoo on them. Lou also dropped back a spreader bar and some daisy chains. Trolled over the fingers (small canyons) in 180' of water and had a couple short strikes (probably small dolphin). We trolled the spread by a longliner's buoy and got a double on dolphin. Pulled in 1-10 lb'er. We trolled and trolled for 3+ hours for nada as we continued east towards the Norfolk Canyon. Finally, we started metering lots of bait. Still no strikes. About 1:00PM we were ready to drop deep jigs down for some blueline tile fish. As we got ready to reel in the trollers the flatline went off but, didn't even pop the clip. We guessed small yellowfin. Lou grabbed the rod, popped the clip and said "big fish on". I was dying to throw some live bait to get the school up but, no live bait. After 1 hour and 5 minutes we sunk the gaff into a very fat round Bigeye tuna. Since it was already after 2:00PM and we had a long way to ride home in building seas, we called it a day. At the dock, the fish which we estimated at 175 lbs actually went 201 lbs! That's after being bled.

what was your water temps? Got any numbers?

Yeah Jeff,
Don't ya wish we were catchin some big tunas round here bout now?
If you want to sail Doghouse through the panama canal and up the East Coast, I could get some #'s for you. I guess you could just trailer her there too. The water was 71.8 degrees where Lou hooked the fish. Interesting fishing there because of the variety of offshore fish you might catch out on the edge of the Gulf Stream. In my opinion, it's fun and you might catch some biiiigggg fish but, I think I'd have to put a large bait tank on one of those East Coast boats in order to fish live bait. They have tons of tuna but, don't seem to like live baiting in a school of tuna. At least I'm not aware of the right coasters using live bait on the tunas.