You people are really making me feel old...reading this thread made me realize my last long range trip was almost thirty years ago.:bigeek:
Yo Yoshida used to charter the Royal Polaris for a nine day invitational trip and I was fortunate enough to be asked aboard one year. Must have been 1983 or '84. Frank Lo Preste was the skipper and he worked his butt off putting us into fish despite the mild El Nino conditions. I was so exhausted by the end of the trip I slept all the way back to San Diego. Good to hear that Frank is still in the business and doing well.:thumbsup:
For what it's worth, my big fish cutter upper is a Forschner scimitar 40634. Nothing fancy but it works.
Ah.. yo's tackle. I have been on the Royal Polaris,Shogun,Red Rooster when Jorge and Julio were still on it. Really want to get on the Intrepid. I still use a forschner, and my buddy is catching 200lb+ tuna with a pacemaker. I don't ever want to be too old too fish. In the 80's I worked Art's landing,Davey's locker and managed fisherman's supply center. Before building reels for Carl Newell.
Saw Ralph Mikkelsen at the Bill Poole Tribute dinner he still had the same mustache.
Copy from recent post.
Feb 02, 2012
Ralph Mikkelsen, 80, shows he can still land the giant tuna
Ralph Mikkelsen of Northridge, Calif., is one tough angler, who on Thursday posed in San Diego alongside a 306-pound yellowfin tuna he landed during a 15-day excursion into Mexican waters.
The catch, made aboard the American Angler, gives Mikkelsen, who will be 81 next month, six yellowfin weighing 300 pounds or more—a feat that is unrivaled.
"I’ve been waiting for the next 300-pounder to come for 24 years," he said of his latest catch, made after a 30-minute battle that included several runs up and down the rail.
Mikkelsen caught his first "super cow" in 1980, a 321-pound yellowfin. His last, before the recent catch was, a 308-pounder boated in 1988.
As veteran long-range anglers are aware, these are specialized trips and not for the queasy or faint of hard. Giant yellowfin tuna are incredibly powerful and landing them requires strength and stamina.
Of course it helps to have high-tech fishing gear and multiple-speed reels, which were not available back in Mikkelsen's heyday.
"He made several runs up high, so I had to keep changing gears," Mikkelsen said.
The top catch aboard the American angler was a 320-pound tuna by Dennis Saylors.* It was Saylors' first super cow in 20 years of fishing on longe-range boats.
The American Angler was skippered by Brian Kiyohara, whose passengers landed 27 yellowfin weighing 200 pounds and three topping 300 pounds.
That's a lot of sashimi.
-- Pete Thomas