FREEDOM 1.5 DAY CHARTER SEPT. 22-23

Written By: Charlie Massingell, CharterMaster

The last FIB’ers charter of 2026 was a 1.5 day trip on The Freedom out of 22st Landing. The fishing the week before our trip was very good and our confidence was high as we watched the catch being unloaded from the trip before ours.

We arrived at the Osborne Bank around 4 a.m. and a few anglers went to work catching bait (mackeral) to go along with our small supply of sardines. With the El Niño this year, good healthy sardines are hard to come by so we had to work with what we had. In the dark making bait we had free swimming marlin around the boat and we went 1 for 5 on marlin on this trip with Philip Hunt landing a marlin on the troll. Big thanks to Phil for sharing the Marlin meat with everyone on board.

While making bait, the skipper showed me the his sonar that showed solid yellowtail under the boat but by sunrise the fish had moved on. We picked away at a few yellowfin tuna with Marlin and a Mako Shark but we were wasting are precious bait so we went looking for offshore kelps. The skipper and crew traveled for a few hours looking but only found colder water and very small kelps holding no fish so we returned to the bank hoping the fish were in more of a biting mood. Again, we picked away at a few more fish with Skipjack, Bullet Tuna and Mahi this time.

Things slowed down so we moved off to fish rockfish and this helped fill our sacks and we hoped for a sunset bite. The sunset bite never happen but some FIB’er anglers stayed at the rail till the end.

The final boat total was 16 Yellowfin Tuna, 6 Skipjack, 2 Bullet Tuna, 2 Mahi, almost limits of Rockfish and 1 Marlin.

First fish was Rick Chalmers with Bonito.

Biggest Yellowfin tuna was by Mike Grothus 20.4#
Biggest fish was Philip Hunt with a Marlin.