Last week, I invited Mike Batta and Brandon Cotton from Okuma out to do a little product testing on the On The Water Blackwatch south of Martha’s Vineyard. The boat and the gear worked perfectly, and with albies, bonito, bluefish and bass cooperating, you could say the trip was a “Grand Slam.”
Mike Batta is the Northeast Rep for Okuma and Brandon Cotton, who was visiting from California, is the Marketing Director. We pushed off the dock in Falmouth Harbor at 8 am and headed through Muskeget Channel on the east side of Martha’s Vineyard toward the area known as “The Hooter.”
Upon reaching the Hooter, we found boats stacked up on the east edge of the rip, but my marks from the week before were to the west so I turned in that direction rather than following the fleet. We were going to use a 3 or 4 line spread with Yo-Zuri Crystal Minnow deep divers, Rebel FasTracs and Savage Sand Eels. I cranked the boat up to 7 knots to try to keep the bluefish off our spread and put lines in. Less than 30 seconds after the last rod was put in the holder, the port reel started to dump line. After a fairly long fight on light tackle, we had the first fish of the day, an unexpected 36-inch striper! The bass hit that Yo-Zuri at 7 knots! Even at that trolling speed, we managed to pick up several blues including one pushing close to 10 pounds.
One feisty blue had me experiencing déjà vu from the week prior, when OTW’s Anthony DeiCicci buried a hook in his hand. Mike Batta experienced a similar fate in about the exact same meaty part of his palm. Last week my regret was that we didn’t get video of the extraction, so I asked George Clondas of OTW to ready the camera as we prepared for surgery. I’m not a fan of pushing a hook through someone’s hand, but Mike wanted to keep fishing and to his credit pushed it through himself.
We went back to trolling, and the hot lure was the “hot tiger” color Yo-Zuri on the port corner. We had just re-set the spread and was trolling over one of my waypoints from the week before when that rod went off. I stepped back to inspect it and saw the drag dumping line and knew we had a good one. A fat albie of about 12 pounds found its way to the net after a few more strong runs and a tough spiral beneath the boat. It was a great test for the Okuma gear, and I can attest that the drag on the Cedros spinning reel worked flawlessly on that fish.
While taking a short break from trolling, we caught one more bass, this one a little bigger at about 38 or 39 inches. It seems the bass were holding in deeper water on the edge of the drop off.
A couple more albies and then a bonito rounded out the coveted Grand Slam for us. The bonito hit the Rebel, which I had been running short, about 15-20 feet behind the prop wash. This was a small one compared to what we had been getting the week before, but it was just as tasty. Brandon and I enjoyed a little sashimi back at the dock as I bagged up the fillets.
