We were fishing with Live Ballyhoo again today and we had another good day
The Bait was pretty easy again. The Reef has been stacked with schools of Ballyhoo and very common Baitfish. At times it is advantageous to fish with dead-rigged ballyhoo and at times we do. But this time of year the live ballyhoo works much better. it’s like the difference between Filet mignon and a Cheese Burger. I’ll eat both, but given the choice, I prefer the Filet. So whenever possible, I like to fish with the live ballyhoo this time of year. We went to Western Dry Rocks, one of the many reef areas in the lower keys. One throw of the cast net and we had over 100 baits in our well.
We started fishing on the Reef Edge
usually, if there is a lot of bait, there are a lot of fish to be caught. It was decent, but not red hot. We caught some nice Cero Mackerel and a couple of Yellow Tail Snapper but it got slow fairly quickly. I moved out to the outer Bar. It is a secondary outer reef that sits about a 1/4 mile outside the main reef. We worked along the Bar and caught and released a couple of big Barracudas, A few more mackerels, and a nice Mutton Snapper. We had a fair bit of “sort strikes”. Most probably from small mackerel and fished for a while without putting much in the boat.
As we got to the west
I saw some bait “showering” up ahead of the boat. A bait shower is when a predator attacks a school of bait and they all jump out of the water. it’s cool to see. As the bait showered next to the boat I saw 3 nice-sized Dolphin or Mahi chasing them. My mate quickly threw bait to them and the biggest, A male about 18lbs, inhaled it. My angler did a great job fighting the Mahi on 20lb spinning tackle and it definitely was the fish of the day
We finished the day
Working the reef back towards Key West and put a few more Mackerel and Yellowtail snappers in the boat