From 5/17/01</font id=blue>
They say that variety is the spice of life. Well I do not know much about spices but I do know that using a little variety in your fishing techniques can mean the difference between coming home skunked, or with some fish in the box.
A couple of weeks ago I was hanging out on the docks at Ripley Light for the 50/50 weigh in and Laird Staley, who many of you know from our Tuna Seminar, asked me if I would be interested in fishing the SCSSA Early Bird Wahoo, Dolphin, Tuna and King Mackerel Tournament with him. He said he was fishing with Les and Jan Oar on their 24-foot World Cat, “Hotta Yet.” Each of us was extremely excited about the trip, and we all even planned on taking Friday off before the tournament to pre-fish and get a good idea where the temperature breaks and the fish were located.
Wednesday rolled around and the winds picked up to 25 to 30 knots out of the northeast, a strong cold front was pushing through the area and the seas had jumped up to 10 to 12 feet near the Gulf Stream. Even though the seas began subsiding Thursday, we canceled our Friday trip knowing it would still be too rough to fish.
We met on Thursday night at the Captain’s meeting and began formulating our plans for Saturday. Friday evening we met again, this time at the Oar’s house, where we pooled our tackle together, got the boat ready, and solidified our plans for the tournament. We pre-rigged about 20 different baits and took a look at the weather and sea surface temperature maps. We located a small finger of warmer water that looked like it was pushing west just between the northern tip of the Southwest Banks and the Georgetown Hole. Less picked a few waypoints in this general area and we planned on running north and looking for breaks where the water temperature rose from 69 to 72 degrees.
We left Shem Creek at 5:30 am and prepared for our 2-hour ride. According to the latest weather report I pulled off the Edisto NOAA buoy, the swells were two and a half feet with ten s