Todays goal was to spend part of the day looking for a Sailfish. Usually live bait is the best way to catch a Sailfish, so we spent the morning on the anchor trying to catch live Ballyhoo. There haven’t been many ballyhoo around this year. Fortuanetly, this past week there have been some moving through. I’m a little rusty on my cast net throwing, but I managed to catch close to 100 baits.
When we are trying to catch live bait, we usually fish for other fish also. It can be very effective to put out a live bait on the reef and put a line down for yellow tail snapper. Both worked well. We got about a half dozen Keeper yellow tail and some big Barracudas. The best fish we got was a 27 lb King mackerel all on 20lb Spinning tackle. We only had one angler and he wasn’t interested in taking any fish home.
So we had enough bait and enough fish for his dinner and headed out to look for our target species.
To be honest there haven’t been many Sailfish around lately, but as I’ve said in other posts, it’s not my trip and my customer. He has fished with me for years, and he wanted to give it a try. Weather was beautiful, seas were calm, but the Sailfish were elusive. Never saw one, but we did catch a few more barracudas, a silky shark and another kingfish. No complaints, sometimes you just got to try!