Some very entertaining stuff happening over the past month. Fishing has been pretty damn good, with just enough slow days to make the good days oh, so sweet. And I’ve been lucky to have had some great people to do it all with. Had Andy Bayne and his fishing buddy Carlos from Pittsburgh, Pa. out in the middle of January during some very un-seasonal warm/calm summer-like weather. The jacks were good, fish in the five to twelve pound range cooperating well almost anytime we wanted. But the majority of the four days we fished were spent on the spinner sharks. I didn’t keep accurate totals, but I think they hooked upwards of thirty sharks, boating nine. The sharks had chosen a particular stretch of beach near a good number of condo’s to hang out, and they restricted their patrol routes to less than fifty feet off the beach. Needless to say, there were very few bathers in the water. I’m sure anyone living in those condo’s were well aware of the “big, brown fish” in close to the beach. We saw several sharks passing between bathers and dry sand less than twenty feet away.   So, we set up and brought the sharks in on the chum trail and proceded to hook them up, sending them jumping and running in all directions. This would immediately draw quite a crowd.  And when we released a shark, we would get a resounding cheer from the “gallery”. It still amazes me the number of times someone from the beach would yell out” What kind of fish is that?” Yelling back “Shark!” would get some pretty funny looks. Also during that time we were treated to a very early season king mackerel blitz. Late February through April is the typical time for kings here, I can’t remember a January run of the line- dumpers, and we hooked fish on almost every drift through the fleet. And a serious fleet of boats it was sitting on top of this large school of king mackerel. Close to a hundred boats were in on this party, commercial king boats, charter boats, and with it being a weekend, huge numbers of “weekend warriors”. And the sweetest thing of all was having the other boats just drop-jawed shocked to see fly rods doubled over with one, two and once a triple header at almost all times while their livebaits were going untouched. I think they’re still scratching their heads over that one. The kings moved on pretty soon after that, but the jacks and sharks have stayed and intersperced with some tarpon, some night-time snook, a few magnum sized cudas, continue to be the menu for the forseeable future.  We’ve crossed the thousand fish mark on jacks this winter, and I’m not certain on the number of sharks hooked, but judging from the number of shark flies I’ve tied, it must be close to two hundred and fifty, boating less than thirty pecent of those. False albacore have already started to make an appearance, about as early as I’ve ever heard of. I hear the dolphin in the keys have started to pick up, which means their imminent arrival here. And an impressive number of wahoo have been reported offshore. Just a few things to look forward to.