Red Rhino Trip to the Philippines

**joel-maui** · May-13-2009, 07:19 PM

5200 hundred miles at eight knots= a shit ton of fishing. I was part of a crew of 5 that delivered the 85' steel cat the "Red Rhino" to the Philippines from Honolulu. Everyone in Maui knows the boat it was moored out in front of Lahaina for years and was a great spot to catch opelu. We left on Feb 19 and 26 days later we were in Subic bay in the Philippines. We fished almost every day and caught a ton of fish. All we had was two 80's packed with 100# test and a couple of extra spools. After leaving Honolulu we headed towards Johnston atoll then towards the Marshal Islands. Johnston was the best ono grounds I ever seen but the weather was up so we only made two passes. We only had 4 days of malia weather and the rest of the time it was blowing 20+. But the trip was down wind the whole way so it wasn't too bad. After about 5 days we had been spooled 3 times so we ran 7 inch baits or smaller trying to keep the blues away. He caught way more fish than we could eat so we filled a freezer and gave it to the locals when we got there. We caught 2 blue marlin (lost about 15), over 30 mahis, about ten ono's, and a few shibi's. We never caught any big ahi's and all of our bites were blind strikes or in bird piles. We never found any floaters. Actually we didn't see shit. We saw a ship by Johnston then saw our next one almost 3 weeks later near Guam. We did stop by a "secret" atoll and we were able to get off the boat for a day. At this "secret" atoll we did some free diving and shot some fish and grabbed some bugs. It was by far the best diving I had ever seen. Choke ukus, uluas, napoleon wrasses, omilus everything but we were way under gunned. Good times! Here are some pics.IMG_0173.jpg

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**patfishhi** · May-13-2009, 07:26 PM

Now that sounds like fun...

**midnightrambler** · May-13-2009, 07:46 PM

whats the plans for the red rhino in pi ?

**jagerhunchback** · May-13-2009, 07:47 PM

wow!!!! now that right there is the trip of a lifetime, thanks for sharing this!!!

**Sam Seafood** · May-13-2009, 09:07 PM

What a trip!Thanks for the report & pics.Aloha

**hiloboy** · May-13-2009, 09:29 PM

Mahalo for the story and pic's!

**SealBeachKid** · May-13-2009, 11:24 PM

Thanks for the story...epic trip. Glad you made it safely.

**navyaircrew** · May-14-2009, 12:08 AM

Dude, that was sweet... i bet it was peaceful.. hope all the mechanical stuff went well allowing it to be peaceful... what rods/reels did you use? what lures were you running? looks like the bobby brown purple/black soft heads... choke report bra