In the winter we try to utilize our days off by doing annual maintenance, and projects to prepare for the upcoming season.

We have been in the boatyard the last couple day, changing the shaft, painting the bottom, cleaning the hull, just stuff. We went back in the water this morning, and back to Hatteras Harbor. I have been spending a lot of time in my shop lately, refinishing my fighting chair, and building new fish box lids. In a few more days, I should be done, and back to work on the 29 footer I'm building. I finished glassing the inside, and am about a week away from starting on deck beams. My customer backed out on the deal, so anyone interested, I've got a great carolina built center console under construction, in the shop. Today is beautiful, so if I get some fishing news, I'll post it. It looks like wind for the next two days though.

We went south today, and had a handful of wahoo bites to go along with a gorgeous January day.

I must say that there really weren't too many bites around the fleet, but we got lucky and had a total of seven wahoo bites for the day. The unfortunate side of that is we only landed two. One of them was a 50 pounder though! I wish everybody could have as great an attitude as my guys did the last couple days. I heard one of them say this afternoon, ''It's a beautiful day, we're offshore, got some fish in the box...it don't get no better than this''. Everybody wants to fill the box up, it just doesn't always happen like that. It's nice to have a group just out to have fun, and that they did! How many times can you spend a day in January, in a t-shirt, getting sunburnt?!

It was not your typical January day, slick calm, and t-shirts. Fishing could have been better though.

My group had their hearts set on catching tuna, so we headed back up to the east. Unfortunately we were greeted with five knots of current, and almost no bites. I found some good water that crossed a spot I like, and we fished it for an hour or so, till the hot water pushed in and screwed that up too. We had four tuna bites, and landed three of them. Believe it or not, we were one of the lucky boats. There were a couple boats to the south, and they had a few wahoo bites, and caught some dolphin. It sounds weird reporting dolphin catches in January, but we're just dealing with the facts here. I think I'm gonna head south tomorrow.<s

I haven't had much to report lately, mainly due to a run of bad weather. Finally, the weather broke, and we were able to get in to some good yellowfin fishing.

We did go commercial kingfishing a few days ago, and it was slow, but other than that, today was the first day that I've been out since the last report I posted. I was thankful to see the nice weather today, even nicer than the forcast (that's unusual). My group wanted tuna, so I went where I thought we would have our best chances. The conditions were perfect, but no bites. I got a report of some bites a pretty good ways up the line, and we decided to give it a whirl. It worked out. We had a box full in a couple of hours (18) and called it quits. These were 30-40 pounders, nice fish. Now, it looks kinda gloomy for the next couple of days, so be patient!