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today had a tough time offshore Sailfishing yesterday. We didn’t stay long. Too bad too as conditions look great. Sometimes you have to make an “executive decision” and give up something on the fishing end so the customers are comfortable.

So today,

we decided to go shark fishing in calm water today. I have a spot that can be really good this time of year. I could be blowing 40mph and it would still be calm. It’s a deep trench in the flats. 12-16 ft deep surrounded by shallow water 6-8 ft deep and less. You have to be careful getting a 40 ft boat in there, but it’s good anchorage and the sharks like it. In this spot, we catch mostly blacktip sharks and lemon sharks.

Every once in a while,

we catch a hammerhead. Yesterday was one of those days. We were not set up long, only about 20 minutes, when we got our first bite. It was a scalloped hammerhead shark. About 70-80lbs. Not a record setting monster, but a lot of fun on light tackle. Scalloped Hammerheads are distinguished by the “ripples” across the front of their head. They are one of the 3 members of the hammerhead shark family that are considered to be dangerous to humans.

We were using 30 lb test,

which is pretty light for shark fishing. It makes it more fun when you are catching medium sized sharks, but if a really big one comes in, you could be fighting it for hours. Because it is very shallow all around the spot we were fishing, it can be tricky if you have to chase a big shark down with the boat. Even a 10 ft shark can swim in 2-3 ft of water. The Southbound can’t. I need at least 4 ft of water to maneuver. I’m not crazy about being in that shallow. I try to keep it to 6 ft or more to be on the safe side, (you never know when a coral head will pop up). So a big shark in light tackle doesn’t always work out. If the shark goes over a flat, I can’t follow.

Unfortunately, because the tide changed

and the boat traffic on a beautiful Sunday was much more than I anticipated, We only got the one shark there. We made a move out into the gulf on the north side of Key West. Again, it was very calm and again, unfortunately, there was much more boat traffic than I anticipated. We started catching a few black nosed sharks on spinning tackle, but every time a boat or two came by, things got quiet.

I think we ended the day with 4 sharks.

The scalloped Hammerhead was the biggest. More importantly, we ended the day with everyone feeling good.