Posted on July 10th, 2015
Photo credit Dave Messick / Hooked on OC
Day 1 of The 28th Annual Ocean City Tuna Tournament is in the books and it was quite an exciting first day considering that only 34 of the 94 boats registered set out to try their luck this morning. It was rough seas to start the day with 7 foot seas every 5 or so seconds, but with the forecast saying things were going to lay down, some tried it. The forecast was right and sea conditions improved dramatically as the day went on and we saw good action at the scales.
There were no fish weighed in the Junior or Lady Angler categories and there were no dolphin to meet the 20 pound minimum of the 5 or 6 that were brought to the scales.
In the category for boats 40′ and under, the Foolish Pleasures leads both the single heaviest fish and stringer categories with one 51 pound yellowfin.
In the stringer division you are permitted to weigh your five largest tuna of any species for a possible total of 10 fish for two days of fishing. The stringer category at the end of day 1 looks like this….
3rd place at 114 pounds, Restless Lady.
2nd place at 154 pounds, Reel Chaos. Reel Chaos would have had a much larger stringer but a large bigeye that they captured was bitten by sharks during the fight and therefore unable to be weighed and disqualified from the tournament.
1st place at 398 pounds, a very impressive day on the Espadon.
In the single heaviest fish category it’s simple, biggest tuna wins. You are permitted to weigh bluefin, yellowfins and bigeye tuna for this event. All of the single heaviest fish that we saw today were bigeye that were caught in the canyons. Here’s how the single heaviest fish division looks after day 1…
Fish in OC charter Moore Bills with Captain Rob Skillman is in 3rd place with a 133 pound bigeye.
Espadon had a nice bigeye in their stringer that is currently 2nd place single heaviest fish at 147 pounds.
In first place is a nice 157 pound bigeye caught on board the Blue Runner.
Now I’ll break a little math down for you. With 94 boats registered we have a total of 188 fishing days available for the tournament. 34 of those fishing days were used today which leaves 144 fishing days. Divide that by the number of days left (2), and you have 77 fishing days per day….that’s a lot of fishing left to happen for the last two days of the tournament.
With so many fish being caught and good weather expected for the rest of the weekend, we should see some serious action at The Ocean City Fishing Center tomorrow and Sunday. Scales are open from 4PM – 7:30PM Saturday and 4PM – 7PM on Sunday. Bring the whole family down to see all the action!
