Saturday wasn’t the best of days – beautiful weather with not much happening in the ocean except for the good flounder bite. My charter did well with the flounder in the morning but my baitwell pump decided to die..ends up being a short in the wire due to a bad connector – so i spent the entire afternoon running wires and installing a new pump.
Anyway, even though we had a good morning of fishing this was bad because I promised my fiance, Katie, that i would take her fishing either saturday afternoon or sunday. She works 9-5 like many of y’all, and since i’m usually running charters on the weekend – she doesn’t get many chances to fish. KAtie is a great fisherman – probably good enough to be a guide (hey, she learned from the best 😉 😉 😉 ). Katie likes big fish, so i thought we’d try to find the absent king bite.
After netting bait, i took her to a nearshore live-bottom to flounder fish while i tied up rigs – in 15 minutes she had constant hookups and boated 3 nice flounder and a toad. We kept the 4 pounder (pictured) for dinner.
So – on to kings. After talking to a bunch of the sportfish captains who said the bite has been terrible since friday – i was a little afraid we wouldn’t do well. So i decided to take a gamble and motor out to one of my favorite live-bottom spots that’s about 10-15 miles from the beach. About 8 miles from the beach, we saw a sailfish smashing flyfish – always an awesome sight.
Once we got to my spot (no boats in sight), I put out the downrigger and started letting out a shad for a surface bait – as i was letting the bait out – BAM!! HAnded the rod to katie and 20 minutes later she expertly landed a king in the high 20s. After we set the lines back up, 15 minutes later we had two big flashes in our spread and katie fought and boated a 12lb fish. Roughly 30 minutes later, after a few savage short strikes, we finally brought in a good eating size fish – this 28 inch 7lber.
Her arms worn out – we decided to give bottom fishing a try. This was the only dissapointing part of the day – 15 miles out and fishing for triggers, we boated blowtoads? After catching a few sharpnose sharks and breaking off what i think was a nice grouper, we decided to start to work out way in. We ran into a school of nice albacore and gave them a few casts and had one hookup – but we had to get back in to feed the dog his dinner.
Beautiful weather and good fall fishing! My favorite time of the year!
