September 19, 2012
Mike and I had four anglers on a split charter today. A split charter is a trip where we line up individual anglers that want to go sportfishing but do not have at least three other anglers lined up to go with them. We accommodate these anglers by making phone calls to like-minded individuals, and then bring them all together on what is called a split trip. We often have anglers that show up for the drift boat trips that decide to spend a few dollars and go sportfishing instead. We are always glad to accommodate so long as a one of the Lady Pamela sportfishing boats is available.
We trolled for most of this trip, though the trolling turned out to be slow compared the previous few days. Not so slow that we didn’t catch any fish though! We caught two kingfish on the planer, and a bonito and blackfin tuna on top baits trolled from the outriggers. Mike was working the cockpit and missed a sailfish on the left rigger. He dropped it back and it tried to eat the bait one time, but then swam off into the deep blue sea. Thirty minutes later I was in the cockpit, we were fishing out in front of Fort Lauderdale, and we had another sailfish bite. I teased this fish into 10 frantic runs at the bait before I finally got him hooked. Randy fought this sailfish to the boat, then we tagged it and the fish swam off. After this excitement everybody decided it was time to bring home some dinner so we went to a shipwreck in 200 feet of water and made some drops. The vermillion snappers were really biting, and after everybody caught their dinner we headed back to the barn.