Amistad Day 2 & 3 as a Co-Angler

I spent the night getting ready for fishing with Takahiro by redoing my rods so I could have more reaction baits tied on. We started in the Black Brush area fishing a tree line/channel edge with DD22‘s. We each caught one small keeper on the crank.

The Top Crank is what Omori used, bottom is the Crank I caught my fish

We ran to several more spots and caught nothing throwing cranks, by this time I started to mix in a Jerkbait and trying to fish my finesse carolina wacky rig, but it was tough to do so when he was fishing cranks and moving the boat so much.

My wacky rig was a weedless gamakutsu hook and then a 3/16oz Tru-Tungsten sinker pegged about 24″ up

I ended up picking up my 2nd keeper on the wacky rig throwing out the opposite side of the boat. We continued to hop and would move shallow to deep and back and forth. It was obvious he was scrambling because his main pattern was not producing. He even tried looking for spawners some. We went back to his starting area and I caught one over 6lb throwing my wacky rigged ball breaker into the deeper channel area. Unfortunately that was the last keeper bite I got, caught several short fish. Tak managed to catch 3 more small keepers on the DD22, weightless senko and brush hog. Tak weighed 4 fish for 6-10 and missed the cut after being in 15th after day 1 and I weighed 3 fish for 9-11 and that moved my up from 49th to 46th.

Had to stick around for the pairings & I was paired with Jason Quinn. I was pretty excited, he seemed to be on some good fish and told me we would be doing a bit of everything. We started out on a large flat on the south side of the Mexican waters. I quickly caught a keeper & 2 shorts on my wacky rig. Quinn then threw his 10″ worm and boated a small keeper. We then ran to some bushes which he flipped and missed one. After that we ran into another arm and fished a bush flat and I caught 4 fish on a Green Pumpkin Cyclone Lighting Blade, 3 of them were keepers including one over 3lbs. Quinn only caught two shorts on his spinnerbait. He then caught a reel nice keeper off a big tree with his senko. We then ran and fished some swimbaits over some tree tops in 28ft of water. Quinn got one nice fish on his swimbait and I caught 3 big stipers on the Optimum 6″ Titan pictured below.

After that we got into a nice calm flat creek with a nice ditch running in it and we both filled out our limits and culled fish. He did his damage flipping a pumpkinseed sweet beaver with a 1oz TT Flippin Weight and a weightless senko. I caught my fish, including a 5lb fish on a pumpkinseed power slug. After that, Jason really started running pockets flipping the beaver and I did not have much good water to fish. Quinn ended up culling once more and had a limit for 13-7 and my limit ended up being 13-1 which moved me up to 32nd place. It was kind of disappointing to get my fish early everyday and then get stuck with mediocre bags at best.

Back at the weigh-in Derek Remitz sacked them again and took over the lead. Todd Faircloth crushed a 36lb bag on a swimbait which he claims all happened in about a 15 minute stretch. Also congrats to Seiji Kato from Japan on his big win on the co-angler side. Sounds he like he caught a huge bag the last day out of the back of Grant Goldbeck’s boat, and caught his fish with a unique wacky jig finesse rig.

Buy this Product Here is a pic of the Zappu Inchi Wacky Jig Heads. He used a little 3 or 4″ worm with these jigs on the final day to make a huge comeback and paired it with 7lb flourocarbon.