Miami, Florida - Offshore

I went fishing this past week with a less than enthusiastic attitude toward Dolphin fishing. I had received reports from captains and local anglers that the Dolphin fishing was hit or miss at best, and the fish were small to very small. When you are in the charter fishing business and someone from out of town has you booked, you make the best of the opportunities available to you. We headed offshore of Triumph Reef and started our search for birds. At 12 miles we found diving birds and plenty of small Dolphin. If fact, we were in schools of thirty to forty fish, but we left them in search of bigger fish. The fish we found were 2 to 3 pounds. Too small for cleaning. Persistence and patience prevailed, and we did find a few larger size schools of fish in the 5 to 10 pound range. As the afternoon dragged on, the fishing actually got better, and we found many flocks of birds diving on schools of Dolphin. Considering the heat and time of year , I would describe this weeks Dolphin fishing as fair to good. Wayne Conn, captain of the Reward II (305-372-9470), reported slower Kingfishing than what they had last week. They are still catching a few fish but the action has slowed. Captain Conn did report excellent Bonita action along the reef outside of Key Biscayne. Not to be outdone, Wayne has been taking his charters to deeper water and fishing for Yelloweye Snapper and Snowy Grouper. I took my clients to a “secret spot” off Key Largo this past week and fishing was so good that we didn’t catch a fish! Every fish we hooked was either eaten by a shark or some other bottom dweller. I’m sure we were hooking Mutton Snapper, but as soon as you jerked them off the bottom some other big fish inhaled them. We lost at least a dozen fish to these monsters....it was very frustrating. We were using fifty pound tackle, using live Pinfish for bait, and every bait that hit the bottom got inhaled. We would reel the fish approximately fifty feet off the bottom and it would only take a few minutes for “Jaws” to find them and pull them off the hook. We moved to other spots off Key Largo and found bottom fishing very good. We had plenty of hits but we never brought a fish to the boat. I guess that’s why they call it fishing and not catching.