Bonito!

With the striper fishing slow and the bluefish still too thick, I haven’t been very motivated to fish the salt much since returning from Manitoba. With some recent reports of Bonito along the Rhode Island coast, Josh and I decided to take a look today. We launched from Barn Island and began the search before 6. The plan was to head straight to Block. We had a pretty good idea of where they would be and decided to be patient and see if they would come to us for once.  There were other boats in the area, but they were all on the move while hunting and eventually faded into the distance. We were all alone…

It started slowly at first. A few birds began to congregate. A few silversides hopping across the surface and then…

The bonito were blowing up in small pods all around us. We threw a bunch of casts with Deadly Dicks into the mayhem but never got touched. After 10 minutes, we switched over to plastics and instantly had blow ups. I was throwing a pearl 5″ Houdini and Josh was using a Super Fluke. We both hooked up and were promptly cut off. We had plenty of action, but started the morning by going 0 for 5. Luckily, things improved after that… Josh boated the first one.

I  got the next one…

Things got blurry after that. There were fish blowing up all around us for close to an hour. We had numerous explosions and several more hook ups. In typical tunoid fashion, the boat looked like a crime scene when all was said and done.

Here is a short video of one of Josh’s fish:

Bonito steaks are marinating in the fridge for tomorrow’s dinner!