As I mentioned in yesterdays “catch of the day”, it was a tough day fishing. Hate it when that happens, but if you do this for a living, sooner or later it will happen. I was hoping for a better day today
Today started out slow. First of all, the weather this morning didn’t look good. The forecast was for strong winds and thunderstorms. When I got to the boat, the wind wasn’t blowing near as much as they said it would. The only thunderstorms were almost past Key West already. So I didn’t think the weather was going to be any problem. After yesterday, I was worried about the fishing much more than the weather.
We spent the first half of the day live baiting for a sailfish. There had been a few caught inshore yesterday. My customers today have fished with me for the last 6-7 years, but one had never caught a sailfish. We had some live bait in my well and I thought it was worth spending a few hours trying. It didn’t work, but honestly, it wasn’t a bad plan.
I figured we would spend the morning looking for a Sailfish. If the boats that went offshore were catching dolphin, we would head offshore in the afternoon. If the offshore boat were not doing well, we would anchor up and snapper fish. I figured, either way, we would have a better day today.
The Sailfishing didn’t work out. Never saw one, but it was still worth a try. The offshore boats were not doing much, so we spent the afternoon on the anchor fishing for yellowtail snapper and mangro snapper. We didn’t get our limit, but we got a good bit of fish.
The most exciting part of the day was the “upgrade”. We had seen a couple of big sharks swimming behind the boat and we had lost a couple of good fish to either sharks or barracudas. So we decided to try to hook one. We had a live blue runner out for shark bait. We got a hit, but instead of a shark, we hooked a big barracuda. It jumped a couple of times when we realized that the shark we had seen was chasing it. The shark chased the barracuda right to the boat and ate it less than 5 ft off the starboard side.
Usually, when this happens, you don’t transfer the hook from the fish you have on to the fish that eats him. Today it worked. We hooked up the shark. I think it was a Lemon Shark and had him on for about 10 minutes. Eventually, the shark tail cut the leader, but it was a great bite to see.
We ended up with a decent catch of snappers, some Yellowtail, and some Mangro snapper. all it was a decent catch. It was definitely a better day today