This morning, Pauli and I had Annette, and her son Bo, came fishing with us. We picked up some live goggleyes by Lauderdale Marina, and on the way out we explained all about the type of fishing we had planned. This time of year kite fishing is the most productive type of fishing one can do. It involves flying two specially designed kites from the bridge of the boat, with live baits such as goggleyes, sardines, pilchards or threadfin herrings suspended on release clips beneath the kites. The kites keep the live baits right on the surface, but well away from the drifting boat. Kite fishing in the winter months is highly productive for sailfish, but wahoo, tunas, and mahi-mahi are often caught as well. Anyway, today I wanted to try to hook up 12 year old Bo, who had never been deep sea fishing before, with a sailfish. We popped the kites up right in front of the whistle buoy, in about 110 feet of water. In two hours we caught a kingfish and jumped off one sailfish. Sometimes you just can’t catch everything that bites. Regardless, we put out a fresh set of live baits on the kites and in 30 minutes we hooked another sailfish. This time things went in our favor, even with the sailfish jumping all over the ocean and putting on a good show! It took Bo a good 20 minutes to reel the 6 ½ footer to the boat, where we tagged it and set it free. By the way, I forgot to mention that seas were running about 10 foot that day. Good job Annette and Bo!

Tight Lines,
Captain David Ide