Fishing has been " Red Hot " for the last week or so. Mostly consisting of Dolphin and Kingfish. The bottom bite was great over this past weekend. My boat has been in the shop for the past week so I have been fishing on a friends boat with some clients I have had. Saturday we loaded up on bait and headed offshore looking for some dolphin. We found a board in 800ft of water and picked up a nice bull going 28lbs and caught and released 15 schoolies. We moved on only to catch a few other schoolies.
We decided to run back into the reef to see what we could muster up. Right off the bat we caught a kingfish and a nice 12lb Mutton Snapper off the bottom. Quickly sent the baits back out and caught a few more kings and a nice black grouper that we decided to release to fight another day. We ended the day with plenty of dolphin, kings, a mutton, a grouper, and 1 sailfish.
Sunday I had an afternoon trip looking for Blackfin Tuna. We spent some time at bug light loading up the live well with pilchards and herring. We ran out to 300ft of water and sent up 2 kites with 3 baits on each and 5 flatlines off the other side of the boat. We ran into a school of small dolphin in 290ft of water. Had lots of fun with releasing over 20 fish. I kept live chumming and after about 2 hours we had a sailfish up in the spread. He ate the short kite bait and Josh made quick work of him with a nice release. Just before we picked up to head in we hit a school of bonitas and had lots of fun catching them. Again we caught quite a few of dolphin, and some kings and bonitas mixed in as well. Even though we didnt catch our main targeted fish we still had a great time and caught lots of fish.
Swordfishing has been very good also. I have fished 6 nights this month and caught fish every night except for one. All of our fish have been around the 100lb range. I have herd of quite a few fish in the 150 - 200lb range being caught this month. I would definetly say that we are having what seems to be a great spring run of fish.
I have a few openings left for May offshore and swordfishing trips. We are also offering tuna/tarpon combo trips, and offshore/swordfish trips for the next few weeks. We are just starting to break into our dolphin-swordfish season so keep your eyes and ears open for reports and pictures.
Tightlines,
Capt Joe M