A little slow July 3-5

My mom and dad came down for the weekend, so I got to take dad out and about a bit.

july 3rd offshore shot, lots of schoolies. We kept two and tagged and released a dozen. Robin gets the credit on the two we put in the box.

Weed lines behaved and we found lots of birds and life especially around 700 feet. Our action started with a school of dolphin that put on an awesome show for pop.

Love it when we run into big schools of them and the play in the wake. Yes that is my fat a$$ on the bow …

We followed them generally and life opened up with skippies on the surface and bait everywhere. Robin spotted a billfish from the tower and it made a tour of our baits but showed no interest.

Saturday we went for an afternoon in the back country and dad caught a couple dandy mangrove snappers for dinner.

Yesterday we went on the reef, and it was really hot and really slow. We only stayed for a couple hours. Even though I spotted huge shows of fish on the finder, we really never got them fired up. I chalk that up to being too close to the full moon. Robin and dad did have fun with a pack of juvie mutton’s. We brought home a few fish, ceviche going down right now!

Slow but fun. Best part was time with my dad.

oh – we caught this aquarium wanna be, it is called a doctor fish. Never seen one of those before!

Experimental station time. With the amount of sargassum weed out there, I played around with some weedless rigs. First I tried a wire weed guard on my black fin tuna daisy chain.

And I also tried a weedless ballyhoo rig. It is a two part rig where I bury a southern tuna hook through the backbone and then put a skirt in front of it.

Here is a better look at the ballyhoo rig construction. The hook is removable, so I basically run the line through the backbone to the tail of the bait, then put the hook on and pull it forward. Hard to describe.

Both rigs really worked well. The ballyhoo setup is a little painful to rig, but I am going to work in perfecting it. It definitely cut down the cockpit maintenance!

I also performed an electronics upgrade. My old furuno depth finder screen got cracked during Irma, and progressively got worse and worse. So I ended up upgrading with another Garmin chart plotter and replaced my upstairs unit with a 9 inch display and brought the 7 inch upstairs unit down to the pilot house.

First I had to clean up 3 previous installs. So ground out the old holes and filled them with epoxy …