I started watching the weather very close the middle of last week as the weekend appeared to be shaping up for the first time in quite a while. With seas projected to be 2-foot or less I had a crew committed by Thursday evening for a trip Saturday. Since the true blue water fishing has been a little spotty for the dolphin; my crew and I formulated a plan to run to 90 feet and get on some big Spade fish. I never fish this area without taking along some good live bait so we pulled away from the dock at 6:30 and by 6:45 we had a net full of medium size menhaden. We then ran to the end of the rocks and started patrolling the tide lines in search of some cannonball jellies. We spent close to an hour looking for the jelly balls without any luck. We had plenty of frozen shrimp and some squid and decided to head on with what we had. One more quick stop in about 60 feet of water, and with a few jigs of the Sabiki we had some really nice blue runners and a couple of butterfish to top off the live well. The ocean was absolutely gorgeous and in short order we are on top of our numbers in 90 feet.
While running out I had noticed the live well was overflowing some, I had just installed a new live well pump and I had assumed that between the high-speed pick up and the brand new pump, water was running in a little more than the overflow could keep up with. It was no big deal as the water was just running right out the scuppers and I figured once we stopped, that without the high-speed pick up forcing water in on top of the pump it would equalize.
I manned the helm keeping us on top of the structure while my crew was upfront getting everything rigged. We made a couple of drops on the bottom with some chicken rigs and pulled up a few B-Liners that went into the fish box and shortly thereafter the Spades came to the surface. As we begin to drop some peeled shrimp on to the school I noticed we had some water that had collected in the front of the boat around the fish box, I also noticed the live well was still overflowing so