In a recent post,
I mentioned I have been having some father/son groups on the boat lately. I always enjoy
having family fun trips onboard. The last two days I had another was another one. They took advantage of one of my vacation specials with free accommodations. We had a full day yesterday and a half day today.
On the full day, we went offshore looking for dolphins, (mahi).
It was slow at first even though conditions looked good, fishing was slow at first. We are just coming off a full moon and it has been bright at night. When the water is as clear as ours and the moon is bright, I believe the fish can feed at night. Because of this, they are sometimes not very hungry in the early morning and will start to feed as the day goes on. That seemed to be the case yesterday. We saw birds “working” but didn’t get much fish under them…….at first. But as the day went on, the fish got more and more aggressive. We started to put a good catch-together!
We left early, as I usually like to do
and because it was a full day, I headed out deep. At one point we were fishing in 2,000 ft of water and approx. 70 miles off the coast of Cuba!!, (that’s 20 miles off the coast of Key West, it just sounds much cooler to say it that way!)
By the end of the day,
we had a dozen “Keepers” and had thrown a few back. We lost a few because a couple of times we had 4-5 fish on, but we only had 2 anglers. sometimes when that happens, some of the fish jump off. It’s a good problem to have!
Today was the second day of my 3-night special
and it was only a half-day trip. We didn’t have time to head out deep looking for Mahi and my customers didn’t really want any more. They had plenty to take home from the first day.
So we decided to look for a Sailfish.
It is not the best time of year for catching Sailfish, but there are always a few around and there were a couple caught yesterday, so it didn’t sound like a bad plan. Unfortunately, there was not much time on a half day and we did not catch a sailfish. We did get some full-sized Bonitos. They do not have much food value to them, but they do pull very hard and are a lot of fun to catch.
Bonitos are family fun
The group I have tomorrow wants to go for Mahi
So we will be going out deep. The weather looks to be excellent and the boats offshore did well today so I am hopeful we will find “our share” Time will tell. Looking forward to some more Family Fun on the Southbound