My wife and I are down in BPK for two weeks that are kind of split in half. This past week our daughter joined us, she is currently living in Texas doing a PHD program at Texas Tech in Lubbock. She is certainly happy to get away from all the storms out there, and also get back on salty water! She grew up fishing and spent most of her early years either on a horse, or with a rod and reel in her hand.
Friday the wind was still honking, so we took the skiff up to the content keys area and did some touring, drifted the flats, and snorkeling. I don’t think the water can be any prettier than this …..
When the tide turned around we spent the afternoon drifting some flats. My wife caught this tasty mutton throwing a gulp shrimp on 12 pound test. Really great fight in 3 foot of water with that light rod! We also picked up a bunch of mangroves, and had a nice snapper dinner!
Saturday, we took the woodytoo offshore, seas were crazy sloppy, kind of all over the place, and the weeds were thick and scattered. So it made it difficult in cockpit but we managed through it. We started in close without any luck and worked our way out generally to the humps straight south of looe key. Very, very slow all morning. When we got to 650 ish and we found some better weed lines, a bunch of birds, and started picking up dolphin. In the middle of the flurry, we had a blue marlin smash a blue and white Hawaiian eye rigged with a horse ballyhoo on the short rigger but it did not come tight. We freespooled and he picked it up again and we had it for about 15 seconds peeling line and then gone again. Close!!! When we got back to the house my daughter decided to beat me with a fish … I guess she was mad at me for missing the blue one!
Sunday calm winds and seas made for a wonderful ride! We ran straight out to the 650 mark and again found scattered weeds and nothing really biting! Do these fish have keys disease? They don’t seem to want to bite until the afternoon! We ended up running out toward the wall, and found a couple awesome weedlines in 850 or so and started steadily picking up fish. There always seems to be a story with us – but I put my wahoo planer down and it got wacked hard by a decent dolphin. I have the drag cranked hard on that outfit so the fish waterski’d straight to the surface. As I wound it in toward the boat what looked like a mako wide head and shoulders came grayhounding up from behind it and smashed the fish. Don’t know for sure about if it was a mako or not, it was certainly big and acted like one. I run that rig on wire, too bad he missed the hook! End result:
There you go, long winded fish story, but a lot on! Next week I have some of my old navy buddies coming down and we will do it again! Best part of it all this week was spending quality time with my girls, I am a lucky guy!
Bo
Gorham Fishing Team 