October 21, 2011
Today was a lot of fun. This morning’s trip I had a great group of guys, the Lambert brothers from New Jersey. Fishing was a little slow in the morning. We kite fished for sailfish for three hours with live goggleye’s and never saw a fish in the kite. So, the last hour we went trolling for kingfish and they were biting pretty good off the planers, rigged with fresh bonito strips and sea witch feathers.
On the afternoon charter Thad, Woolley, Cody, and Bret joined us. They were all from Texas and you could tell they were going to be a lot of fun. We purchased live bait on the way out to try some more kite fishing, even though the morning bite was slow. We had a cold front that had pushed through today, and it was 64 degrees with the wind blowing out of the north around 15- 20 knots. A cold front like this gets the sailfish up and moving from the north to the south, and I was sure we were going to see some fish. We spent the first ten minutes kite fishing, in 110 feet of water, and Woolley instantly caught a 15 lb kingfish. We put the kite back out for another 25 min with no action. I saw a current edge offshore of us in 650 feet of water so I ran out there with the kites up. There were 6-8 foot seas outside and two out of the six customers were getting sick. So, after 25 minutes I decided to reel them up. As we were reeling the baits up a nice little school of 10 lb mahi-mahi swam up and we caught two of them, then we ran back to calm water.
A good friend of mind Ray Ray called me on the phone and said when he was running back from Palm Beach he had seen a few schools of mullet swimming south, one in 110 feet of water and one in 250 feet. He said he might have seen some sailfish on them. I immediately reeled in the kites and ran north. We got 4 miles up the line and from the tuna tower I saw the huge school of mullet in 100 feet water. I yelled to my mate Paul to get some spinners ready to cast as soon as I pulled up to the bait ball. There were at least six sails there, maybe 8, and a nice sailfish grabbed the first bait Paul pitched. We caught the fish in five minutes, ran back to the school, and one of our guests pitched another bait. He hooked a sailfish on his own, but broke it off. We saw one more fish that we pitched several times to, but it just would not eat. Overall, it was a great trip, and to see all those sailfish on top was a sight.
Tight Lines,
Captain David Ide
954 761 8045