SSP 9/28 - no fish but saw some nice ones come over the rail

[tesseract]

Got there around 10am, left at 3. Unfortunately got totally skunked. Went to the end of the pier around 1pm and saw 2 nice HUGE bonitos come over the rail, one looked around 15 pounds, the other 10 pounds. They were using chum (cut bait) to lure them in from deeper waters.

During the whole day I was there, saw about 10 macks come over the rail. I heard they were biting earlier in the day before I got there. The only good thing about catching no fish is you have no fish to clean and the cooler won't smell bad for a week! 😅

[conureman]

That's a trend that I started to notice. The bite is really good for macs in the morning when the sun starts to peak the horizon from the bait shop to the end of the pier.

[stuckintherocks]

Those bonitas are so damn fun wish they’d show up a little more consistently

[fishsci]

Reminds me of summer fishing from SE FL piers when I was a kid. Just after the sun came over the horizon, we waited to see huge schools of bait, typically ballyhoo or scaled sardines (pilchards/whitebait) streaming into the pier while being blasted by huge schools of bonito (false albacore). Something that we learned was that the bonito, even though they were in a feeding frenzy, were very leader-shy. They would not hit a live bait that was on a wire leader, usually anything over 20# leader/line did not get hit, and they really only hit bait tied to a small hook on 8-10# line. A 12# bonito can strip your 200 yards of 8# unless you are lucky. The point is, if you want to tangle with one of these torpedos, get there early and use only light line and small hooks. Bonito do not have much in the way of teeth, so they can be landed on light line tied directly to the hook without any leader.

[tesseract]

Sept 29, 2023 21:05:33 GMT -5 fishsci said:

Reminds me of summer fishing from SE FL piers when I was a kid. Just after the sun came over the horizon, we waited to see huge schools of bait, typically ballyhoo or scaled sardines (pilchards/whitebait) streaming into the pier while being blasted by huge schools of bonito (false albacore). Something that we learned was that the bonito, even though they were in a feeding frenzy, were very leader-shy. They would not hit a live bait that was on a wire leader, usually anything over 20# leader/line did not get hit, and they really only hit bait tied to a small hook on 8-10# line. A 12# bonito can strip your 200 yards of 8# unless you are lucky. The point is, if you want to tangle with one of these torpedos, get there early and use only light line and small hooks. Bonito do not have much in the way of teeth, so they can be landed on light line tied directly to the hook without any leader.

Interesting you say this, both bonito hookups were on 15-pound fluoro (or monofilament) leader. They had to use the hoop-net to pull it up.