11/14/2023
If you saw the movie Shawshank Redemption you may remember the quote... "get busy living or get busy dying." It's a great quote to live by. Yesterday was a day I will forever remember. JP, Brad and I had a crazy day. It first started out very subdued. We found a bunch of birds and we started to catch small stripers. We quickly moved on looking for something bigger. In our search every now and then we would see huge explosions from bluefin tuna blowing up bait at the surface. The novice Kirk would have spent the day running and gunning hoping to get a cast off while the bluefin was on the surface. Due to the many hours I have put on the water I decide to concentrate on finding bigger bass. Sure enough we found some really nice size bass. We had them on poppers, swim shads and jigs. We finally had a good jig bite when we encountered the bass in 50 feet of water or deeper. When we found them shallow we were able to catch bass on just about every cast using a swim shad. We had a blast throwing poppers at will. We took off all the trebles on our poppers and just had a blast filming bass hitting the surface.
It was 1:30 when we started to notice a lot more bluefin on the surface. At this point we had caught enough bass to take a break. So we put out one rod. Just one. It was rigged with a Joe Shute/ballyhoo. As we started to troll we actually had BFT blowing up near the boat. My buddy Brad was dying to bust out the tuna popping gear but I know from past experience you can't do both at the same time. So we continued to troll. It took all of 10 minutes for our 70 to start to sing. I jumped up, pushed the drag up to strike. It was at that moment I knew it was a bluefin and not a big bluefish. We strapped JP in and we were off to the races. As we are fighting the fish the fishfinder keeps lighting up with countless amounts of bass. Two hours later we get the fish boat side and I hit the video button on my phone. The fish spits the hook and we can't wait to watch the video. OH NO! I thought I had a video running. I guess I still had it on photo. We didn't get the video I hoped but the three of us will forever be able to live that moment over and over. Get busy living or get busy dying!
