First year experience

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Scotthmt
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First year experience

Post by Scotthmt »

Well since everyone else is writing their first year experiences I'll type mine out, I thought mine was bad! but by comparison i suppose i did decently.

Fishing out of CA on a 25' power troller, first year, zero experience, never commercial fished before, and had 1 day with a friend who commercial fished for 2 years 6 years ago. That was what i was up against in the beginning.

Second boat i've ever owned, i paid a lot for it. 60k, it was set up well, everything well thought out, new engine, new deck, new tanks, SS and aluminum everywhere. Anywhere i went guys commented on how well it was set up. It made the learning experience a bit easier having a good boat under my feet.

I fished bodega bay for the majority of the season, never scoring high numbers, quite a few days in the teens, a few in the low 20's, a good day for me was mid teens. There just weren't a lot of fish around. I couldn't get my spoons to fish, maybe i used too heavy leader, 100#, and too big hooks, 6/0 95170's. Next year i will be dropping down to 60# and 5/0 hooks on the spoons. Had the same problem with the hoochies, too heavy leader, dropped it to 60 and they started catching, and catching well. Fishing the deep water was interesting, each area posed its own set of challenges, the deep water was nice because I didn't have to worry about being directly on the bottom, but the heavy current was a real pain. Running 17 stops down, or 15 stops down, even with planer boards, or shears, on my heavies, would cause tangles running the floats in and out. Some days weren't so bad, but some days were terrible, floats catching floats catching heavies, ARGH! my sticks are around 25', not sure what the remedy to this is yet. Later on in the season had a pump on my gurdy start going out, not too bad, but it didn't like sending down a 50 very slow, tried to runaway a few times. I just lived with this as the fish moved on the beach shortly after.


Fishing the beach was fun, and had its own set of challenges. First, the fish were on the bottom, the very bottom, if you were 10' off the bottom you weren't catching. Had to be very careful of the tackline, too shallow, hang it up, lose a weight. Yes i lost weights, not too many, maybe a total of 300-350# this season. The other challenge on the beach were the jellyfish, the godforsaken jellyfish. Hit the wire, blow it back, off the bottom, not catching. Run the gear, send it down, hit the jelly. This went on for a month, fighting the jelly, fighting the sport boats, avoiding the other guys. The shallow was fun though, the fish came up super hot, exciting to fight.

A week before the end of the season i was running the boat solo, i had a deckhand the entire season and had only ran the boat solo once or twice before. Well, ended up colliding with another boat, a much larger steel boat, snapping my stick and knocking off my anchor and pulpit. Not too much damage, no damage to him. My fault? his fault? who knows, likely both of ours. I was on back fighting a fish, he was on back running gear tacking out so he didn't hang his gear up. I didn't see him before i went to my back to deal with the fish, by the time i was done i looked up and he was right off my bow. Oh well, no one was hurt, a little damage but not terrible.

The mechanical failures i had this year were very minor. had a freshwater circulation pump go out, and that was about it. ran over a crab pot, and had the collision. not a ton of mishaps. We didn't do as well as i would have liked this season, we caught somewhere around 500 fish, between 30-40k$. although most of that just went to expenses and i am no more ahead than i was before i started, but i did get to fish all year, see some exciting things, and enjoy it as much as possible.

Next year I will get them, onto next year. Thanks for reading.
SilverT
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Re: First year experience

Post by SilverT »

Scottmt,

That's a great report and much appreciated. An accurate account of real experience helps to ground newcomer's expectations to something reasonable. I wish there would have been more of these posted before I set out. Enjoy that work on the boat this winter and best wishes for next season.

Lane
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