Kona Ahi

**MikeO** · Jan-23-2011, 02:53 PM

There were a few Ahi being picked up this week in Kona out of the porpoise schools if you were lucky enough to be there at the right time. We were lucky to have a school run right over us. My friend and I launched a little later on Saturday AM so it was light enough to monitor the sets at the harbor entrance. The swell had diminished enough that it was no big deal to get out. We ran out to F and picked up a small mahi on the first pass. The fish hit a small popper lure from Bomboy. We could not get any more strikes so we decided to setup a pattern and troll south towards C Buoy. I just got the last lure in the pattern setup and the long corner (same small Bomboy) went off and started ripping line. Then the stinger went off. At this point we finally noticed a porpoise school flying north right behind our pattern (duh!). Bob started clearing the long rigger and I told him to leave it out because we might get another strike. His reply was "do we want another one?" While I was pondering that excellent question, the water behind the now not-so-long rigger just blew up, and the skirted ballyhoo got smoked by a nice ahi. What a great site that was. Now we had 3 on with 2 people in the boat....yowsah! We cleared the other lines and started working on the first 2 fish. Right away, the last fish that we had hooked up came unbuttened. We now had a more managable task list in front of us. Both fish made a few runs at us, but we eventually were able to boat both of the fish. One of the fish weighed in at 118# and the other was 152#. It was just after 9:00 at this point and the boat was a mess of blood and lures and crap all over the place. We iced the fish down the best we could with the ice we had and ran back into the harbor to take care of the fish. What a great morning of fishing!