Venice, Louisiana has been called the yellowfin tuna capital of the world for years, and SORD's latest trip out to the rigs with Joey VT — known on YouTube as Joe VT Fishing — is the kind of session that explains why. The fillet-knife brand limited out on yellowfin inside an hour on a sloppy late-afternoon bite, then ran straight back to Gulf of America Outfitters' headquarters to christen a new dockside cleaning station with the day's catch.
The trip was built around equal parts product launch and pure fishing. "We're down here in Venice, Louisiana, and we just got in late last night," the SORD spokesman said in the opening minutes. "Adam from Gulf of America invited us to come down because today is the day that Killer Dock fish cleaning stations get installed at the Gulf of America headquarters." SORD partners with Gulf of America Outfitters as its fillet-knife supplier, and the timing of the install — and the dockside breaking-in — was deliberate.
Weather was less cooperative. "The weather is pretty rough out there. It's probably 4-ft, 4 to 5 at 7 seconds, so they're still spaced out a good bit," he said. The crew left late — a deliberate decision based on a known afternoon bite window — knowing the smaller class fish drop out as the day wears on and the bigger tunas show up. "For the first time ever, we're going to be able to go fishing with Joey VT, come back from fishing, dock right at the Gulf of America headquarters, hop off the boat, and clean our fish all in the same spot," he said.
Joe VT laid out the math on the boat. "Step one, show up. We did that. Step two is to go catch a bunch of pogies. Some people call them menhaden, some people call them bunker, some people in the world call them shad," he said, before turning to the day's brief. "We're going to go putt putt our way out there and we're going to go catch some yellowfin tuna. The bite has been very, very good."
Time of day, in his read, was the whole game. "Usually been getting there early and when you get there early, you usually catch about 50% what we call true peanuts, like 20 to 30 lb fish, and half of them will be 40 to 60," he said. "But once you get there in the afternoon, for whatever reason, the smaller fish dive out, it seems, and it's usually more so like 60-70 lb fish with a couple 40s mixed in and a chance to hook like an actual big one, like 80 plus up to 100 lb." Tagged onto the back end of the day, he added, was a shot at "the man in the blue suit" — a Venice blue marlin.
The plan paid off. The SORD crew limited the boat in under an hour on the rigs, then ran back inside the mouth and pulled up to the new Killer Dock station with fish in the box. For SORD, the cleaning station is core to the brand's product story. "I love the place there at the end of the day of a fishing trip, which is when you're coming back, you just had a great trip, you crushed some fish," the spokesman said. "Everybody's hanging out around the fish cleaning station. We're just cracking up, the music is playing. It's just the end of an incredible day. And that is actually where and why I created a product that fits into that moment, which is our fillet knife."
For the Venice fleet, the trip is a useful real-time data point on the 2026 yellowfin run. The afternoon bite is fishing harder than the morning bite, the rig structure is holding fish in the 60-to-70-pound class with bigger fish mixed in, and pogies — bunker, menhaden, whatever the local accent calls them — are the bait that is getting eaten.
Joe VT, who works out of Venice year-round, was characteristically dry about how the day actually went. "A little impromptu trip, late departure," he said. With a quick limit, a dock breaking-in and a brand-new cleaning station ready for the next boat, the SORD-Gulf of America afternoon ended up being exactly the kind of Venice day visiting anglers spend years chasing.