We had a much better day today!
I had the same customers as I did yesterday. It was a tough day, but we caught enough fish to keep the folks happy. I went the wrong way to start the trip. That’s on me and we recovered and made a day of it, but I was looking to have a much better day today………and we did!
Our first fish of the day
Was a Sailfish. Any Sailfish is cool and this was a big one. Full sized. We don’t bring them in the boat, Sailfish are catch and release, so I can only “guesstimate” the size, but it was probably 71/2 ft long or better. Excellent fish and much longer than our angler! Yesterday, I didn’t have a fish in the boat until Noon. Today, we released a Sailfish in the first 20 minutes, That is always a good start. But, we had a long day to go and we weren’t done.
I worked to the West in about 200 ft of water. Most of the Dolphin being caught were around that depth. We picked up a couple of nice Dolphin, one Bull around 12-13 lbs,
and a smaller cow.
Bull Dolphin
There have been some Black Fin Tuna caught to the West of Key West on a wreck. it’s a sunken Submarine that has been there since before I moved to Key West, (42 yrs ago), so I don’t know the whole story of how or why it got there, I do know it holds fish and I wanted to get to that area before the day was over to see if the Black Fin Tuna were there.
Unfortunately, they were not there
Fortunately, there were some Wahoos! Wahoos are better than blackfin tuna. They are bigger, better eating, and more fun to catch! We had 3 hits on our first pass over the wreck but only hooked one. Unfortunately, we lost it alongside the boat before we could get a gaff in it. Nobody did anything wrong. The angler did well, My mate never had a shot with the gaff, the fish just did something right and got to live another day. It wasn’t a big Wahoo, probably about 18-20 lbs, but I would have liked to give it a “boat ride” to Key West. It was not to be. We re-rigged and went back over the wreck and hooked a bigger fish on the deep troll. This one did get a boat ride to Key West. It was a nice Wahoo, just shy of 30 lbs, (29lbs), and an excellent fish.
29 lb Wahoo
It was getting late in the day
and I was a fairly long way from Key West. We made another couple of passes over the wreck with no bites so we started working our way back to Key West. We didn’t go far before we hooked another Sailfish! This one was a little smaller than the first one, but still a nice fish, (no such thing as a bad Sailfish). There was a second fish with it, but it would not eat the bait. Probably a good thing anyway as this Sailfish was foul-hooked. It was hooked in the tail and we drug it in backwards. We got on it fairly quickly and it swam away so I think it survived. If you fight them too long when they are foul hooked you can kill them and we didn’t want that. If we had hooked the second Sailfish, this one would probably have died as it would have taken a lot longer to bring him in. Unfortunaely, we did not get a picture of either Sailfish we caught today, but i’m glad we got a quick release on them so they both survived.
We headed home
It was a much better day today! 2 Dolphin, 2 Sailfish and one out of 2 Wahoo. Not a lot of bites, but some Quality fish!