Very interesting experience yesterday (6-11). Like everyone else we were trying to find where the dolphin went. Leaving Edisto the water looked great from 100ft on out. Flyers everywhere. Found a break at 130 and caught a nice bull but nothing else. We trolled out headed for the Banks. I was running two lines way back, two off the rigger, and off the corners were running rods with home made, inline daisychain bird teasers. These are made up with 7 or 8 mini-birds on 150-lb mono. On the business end, behind a 10ft leader I usually attach a sub-surface, bullet-head skirted bally-rig.
After about an hour, we had a large pod of small, grey spotted porpoises surround the boat running back and forth across the spread. A newbie with me asked if they would hit a bait and I assured him, that would never happen. With that a porpoise began playing with one of the teasers - at 8mph trolling speed - nipping at it, enough that he would pull drag. After about a half minute of this, both teaser rods go off with tremendous splashes and reels scream. My only thought was “Oh Sh_t, we’ve hooked porpoises:(” We got down the business of clearing the other lines while the porpoises headed off the parts unknown. After sustained fights, we landed two little tunny’s (False Albacore) well over 20pounds each (one weighed 26lbs at the dock). Biggest little tunny’s I had ever seen but what really astounded me was that they were apparently feeding cooperatively with porpoises. I know that yellowfins sometimes do this, but I had never heard of this with other species of fish.
Otherwise a very slow day with only one other knockdown, a miss. Fished from 130 out to 300 and on the way back trolled all the way in to 100. Although there were plenty of flying fish everywhere, we saw many, many more flyers between 70 and 130 than anywhere else. Water temps were consistently 81 to 82 early, 83 to 84 middle of the day. Listening to radio around the Banks, seems most boats doing about the same with no more than two or three fish.
As per WindFin
