I met up with one of my college buddies this past weekend for some fishing. He lives down in Orlando and has a 27' center console out of Canaveral. Friday was extremely rough, so we putted around just outside of the harbor for an hour or so and only got one small bluefish. Saturday was still pretty rough in the morning, but we were at least able to get out to the reef and got our limit of kingfish (then released a few more). That afternoon it got a little calmer so we ran out for some offshore goodies. We got one mahi mahi (which ended up being an accidental release from the boat... whoops) and lost a couple more. We also raised a sailfish, but it didn't take the bait.
-- Sunday was the best day though by far. It was pretty flat, so we ran straight offshore. I started putting the first bait out, set the line in an intermediate position so I could put it in the outrigger, and we got nailed by a mahi. Unfortunately, since I didn't have the reel set properly yet, the mahi couldn't swallow it, and I couldn't get the spool loose in time to save it. A little while later, I got a nice bonito. We ended up finding a big floating barrel with small jacks, triggerfish, and tripletail all over it. We knew there was going to be mahi under it, so we pitched a bait out and got hit. Sure enough, there was a school of about 6 with him, so we left him in the water at the boat to keep the school around. Of course, we decided against bringing the fly rod to save space, and this was the most perfect possible scenario to fly fish for mahi mahi. We ended up getting a couple more mahi before the school started getting spooked by something with our baits and would turn away. We decided to play with the tripletail, and got 6 of them, including one BIG one. We also caught and released a couple small sharks and some small jacks in the melee and even had a 14 ft hammerhead come around and investigate things. On our troll back in, as we were pulling in the last bait, we got nailed one last time. The reel was absolutely screaming, and after a 15 minute or so fight, we had a huge mahi mahi in the boat. We're not quite sure how we didn't lose him since three separate times when we had him at the boat, he surged under and started jumping on the other side from where I was fighting him. We also saw three free-jumping sailfish, but no luck in getting them to check out our baits. Finally, as we ran back in, the reef was on our way so we decided to have some fun with the kingfish. We got three in about 20 minutes (and missed two more), including a big guy.
Offshore has been pretty hot down south and is probably only going to pick up over the next month or so, so if you're thinking about a trip, I'd get down there ASAP!
Jeff
http://www.tpfr.org
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