What I thought was going to be a washout weekend turned out to be one of our fishiest ever. Last week, God remembered that it rains in Florida, and we had 3 days solid of rains and wind. One thing about the tropics, when it rains … good heavens it comes down! Winds too, 20 – 30 mph every day, mostly from the north, steady hard winds. So on Thursday the weather forecast was high winds and surf, small craft advisory, seas 9-12 feet blah blah blah. Friday the story started to change. The fronts pushed through and the winds shifted. Boom – forecast change to light and variable overnight Friday, and pretty much through the weekend, seas decreasing to 1-2 foot. Game on!
Our neighbor, Paul, is a commercial fisherman and with all the COVID stuff going on the fish houses are closed and he has no where to sell his catch. So, he has been fun fishing and offered to teach Robin and I some tricks of the trade out on the reef.
He called on Friday, we put a plan together, and the rest is history! Paul was going to bring the bait and chum, along with the terminal tackle (hooks and stuff). He stopped by Friday night to look at my rods and reels (and pretty much vet me out it think). I showed him what I was planning to bring – rods … too small, leaders … too small … chum bag too small … Wait, chum bag too small? Really???
Then he asked me to help carrying the chum to the boat, good heavens, he had a 150qt cooler filled with 5, 25-pound boxes of chum! Higher math tells me that is 125 pounds of ground up fish parts! This was going to be interesting.
Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of the cooler when we were loading up the boat, but this will give you an idea. Two blocks of chum were already in the water at this point.
I have to say it, Paul is quite the personality, and we talked crap the entire time. Starting with … “Write this down – first light best bite”.
We met at 0600 in the morning Saturday and off we went to the big blue sea. The water was flat calm like a lake, deep blue and a tinge dirty from all the wind. Kinda perfect! The chart below shows where we fished, South and west of big pine, about 8 miles offshore from Little Palm island. In that area the bottom is all rock (fossilized coral) and there is an awesome shelf that drops from 50 feet (top of the reef) to 95 – 100 foot at the base. In the area we fished the drop was not as deep, but it fell like a canyon 50 to 75 feet.
What Paul had me do is zig-zag up the reef to the east watching the sonar for suspended fish. Once spotted, I dropped a mark on the chart plotter, swung the boat around and dropped anchor on the spot. It did not take long at all to find them …
First step, chum in the water. Look at this chum contraption! The milk crate keeps the bag open and he used an old net he had laying around, and zip-tied it into a bag. He said when they are money fishing he would put 50 – 75 pounds in at a time! Insane … Dad jokes and general bullshit started coming out immediately like “If you chum they will come” and “we are going to call to the fish and make them rise from the depths of Nazareth!” Look at that water!
We were targeting 2 main species – Yellow Tail and Mutton Snapper. Yellow tail (keepers) range from a pound or so up to “flags” that can go 6-8 pounds. Mutton are a different beast, they have to be 18 inches to keep (5 pounds) and typically run 15 to 20. This is new territory for Robin and I, we have caught both, but nothing in these size ranges.
The technique we used was called flat-lining, where you put a bit of bait on a light hook, and drift it back into the chum slick. You have to match the hook size and weight to the speed of the drift of bits of chum to be effective.
Here is the line up of terminal tackle. Really small hooks, and a variety of very light weights. We also had a line-up of leaders 20,30,40, 50 and 100 – all fluorocarbon (I am not going to bitch about the cost of Fluoro again!).
The rods robin and I used were my tarpon rods (7’6” Medium Heavy with Penn 550 reels loaded with 50# braid), and the drags were cranked down tight.
Paul also showed us these jigs that he uses grouper fishing. Can’t wait to try some of that action!
So it is a bit of an paradox – wire hooks, 20 – 40 pound leaders, drags cranked to the stops??? Snapper’s eyesight is really good, and the water is gin clear so your presentation has to be clean or no bites. Drags have to be tight because the tax man lurks and he is hungry (sharks) and it is race between hook up and fish in the boat between you and those sharks. As Paul says “Skill vs will – and you are not the one with the Skill!”.
Game on! Paul said that the area we stopped first is known for the largest yellow tail, but also known for sharks. We had fish in the chum immediately but could not get them to the boat before shark attack! We also attracted a big school of Cero Mackerel and our 20 pound Fluoro was no match for the their sharp teeth. The game was float the bait back, watch for the hit, set the bail and reel like crazy – giving no quarter.
At one point, Robin (who is the yellow tail master now!), was cranking a fish and it came up to the surface. Right behind it a decent sized Bull Shark busted out of the water, fin up mouth open – kind of looked like jaws!
We did pull a couple of yellow tails out of that spot and they were huge – 4 to 6 pounders. But between the Mackerel and the Sharks we had to move – so, up anchor, down the reef we went – zig zag, look for fish on the sonar, mark the spot, drop the anchor, dump the chum … you get the idea.
Robin focused on the yellow tail, and really got the touch. She pulled in one after another and I have to do the math but … ok she caught them all!
I switched gears and targeted Mutton Snapper, which is a big bucket-list fish for me. So I used the same setup but a lot bigger bait. Same small hooks, I jumped the leader up to 40 pounds and floated big cuts of bonito or whole butterflied ballyhoo down past the yellow tail looking for mutton underneath them. I hooked up several times and either got cut off, straightened hooks or clean broke the hooks in half. We had gotten out of the sharks so I kept backing the drag off to find the mix between stopping power and not breaking tackle.
Finally, just like textbook, I was feeding out line, something picked it up, flip bail, reel like crazy, rod bends in half, fight on, and this slob shows up under the boat!
These reef fish certainly know how to pull the string! Great day, we limited out on our aggregate snapper limit of 10 per person. Do you see the size of some of those yellow tail???
Since Saturday was so nice, and the forecast for Sunday was more of the same, Robin and took the WoodyToo offshore. The sargassum weed still has not started showing up in mass in the Straights of Florida, but I had heard reports of the Mahi bite really picking up.
The gulf stream has pushed offshore (22 miles south of Looe key) so we knew we need to put some distance in to get into them.
The ride out was beautiful, and we started seeing birds and bait once we got out the lumps in the 550 – 700 foot range.
We put out tuna feathers and my favorite squid daisy chain way back, and Robin chased the birds around while I cleaned and rigged ballyhoo for dolphin. We really did not find anything to speak of, so I changed the spread out to ballyhoo, but kept the daisy chain on a spinning rod way back.
Robin found another group of birds and we could see them pounding flying fish and tuna busting the surface. It did not take long and boom – double header hit long rigger and the spinning rod.
We ended getting one fish, it was a beautiful blackfin tuna in the 20 pound range that ate a ballyhoo.
We kind of screwed up in the mayhem, tangled a bunch of stuff up and lost the other tuna (so no pictures). I ended up having to don the snorkel and mask and clear a line that got fouled tangled on a sonar transducer – thank goodness it wasn’t on the prop! Nothing spookier that going for a swim in that big clear blue water when there are birds and fish busting the water around you. Where there are fish, there is usually a shark lurking!
We cleaned everything back up, re-rigged baits and took off back on plan. Robin in the flybridge, I was in the cockpit. Within 15 minutes we had another double header. First one came tight and started jumping and I saw it was a big mahi, then the second one hit, and I saw it was an even bigger one! Both rods bent in half, LGO (Line Going Out) hard!
Robin threw the boat in neutral and came down to help and between us we got both fish to the gaff and into the boat. Not sure who caught what – doesn’t really matter it was plain fun chaos! Best part, neither fish fit in the cooler, so we had to transfer everything to the transom fish box.
Robin and I kind of looked at each other and declared we were done. 2 days of intense catching, and both days finished before noon! So we throttled up and headed home – 18 nautical mile run. Doing the math we left the dock at 8:30 and ran for an hour out, fished for 2.5 hours and ran the hour back in! I would call that productive!
Last shot is the fish porn … We started last night with some simple sushimi, blackfin in the raw, and then Robin made a Caribbean Mutton Snapper dish, peppers, onions, tomatoes, wrapped in banana leaf and a light butter, coconut, white wine sauce …. Lordy lordy it was good!
Then tonight robin made a tuna poke!
And then followed up with Tuscan tuna steaks! Yowsers!!!
Until next time ….
,
Gorham Fishing Team 