We had a full day trip today. My group was a Bachelor party most of whom were from Louisana. I needed action and some good eating fish for the group and possibly a trophy fish. Some days, things just work out right and today was one of those days. I figured I would start inshore looking for a Sailfish and the go offshore looking for some Dolphin, (Mahi) for their dinner that night. Catching Dolphin or Sailfish makes for a good day. Catching both Dolphin AND sailfish. makes for a great day!
We started in about 200 ft of water looking for a Sailfish. After a little bit of time, we hooked 2 Sailfish. Unfortunately, we only got one to the boat, but it was the bigger of the 2. We also hooked and lost a couple of wahoo in the same area. I worked the area for a while, but when the bites stopped, we headed south to see if we could find any Dolphin, Mahi) for dinner.
We ran out to about 700 ft of water and put our lines back in. There were a couple of slicks and small weed lines to choose from. Sometimes when you have a couple of weedlines close together, only one will have fish. I wish I could tell you why, but it doesn’t make sense to me. I just know it works that way some days. Today was one of those days. The first slick had enough weed that it should have had some fish, but not a bite in the first 30 minutes. I moved to the next one, it looked about the same, but as soon as we started trolling it, we hooked 5 nice schoolie dolphin! Let the games begin!!
We had non-stop action for the next couple of hours. Most of the fish were “gaffer” sized schoolie dolphin. 5-9 lb range. We did have a big Bull dolphin swimming around the boat for a few seconds, but we had fish on every line so we could not get a bait to it. By the time we cleared a hook to feed him, he had moved on.
We ended the day with 29 keeper dolphins, 1 Silky shark released and one Sailfish released. We had a great trip for a great group of guys. These are the kind of days that keep me going!