How very annoying….I went and dumped a bunch of money on a really nice digital video camera to film the spinner sharks with, and of course, they move out the very next day. And by move out, I mean a mass evacuation. Not a shark left within twenty miles as far as I can tell. Oh well….it was great while it lasted. Can’t wait till next year. So, it’s on to the other springtime menu of first king mackerel, then dolphin and then the albies. We already have had several good days fishing the kings over the past month, and a couple of dolphin encounters. Both of these should continue to get better over the next month or two, and by mid May the albies should be on the rampage. With water temps already in the high seventies, it’ll be interesting to see just how early all this happens. We typically have low seventy degree water at this time, but it’s been a warm winter. This, hopefully, will also get the tarpon in a cooperative mood early. So, I guess it’s time to start pumping out a bunch of Eatme flies, over the course of the next six months I’ll tie over a thousand of them. For anyone interested, the March/April issue of Flyfishing in Saltwater has a very flattering article written about yours truly by Capt. Adam Redford. Also for any local Floridians, or anyone finding themselves in the Ft. Lauderdale area in late April, I’ll be one of the guest speakers at the Shallow Water Expo held at the Broward Co. Convention center April 20th and 21st. This is usually a great show with a bunch of good speakers like Lefty Kreh, Flip Pallot, Jose Wejebe, ect. I think I’ll have an “End of the Shark Party” party with the other guys who played with them over the past three months….we’ll drink a toast and reminisce about the bloody knuckles, cramped up arms, and broken/abused tackle. I think my final totals on the sharks were over five hundred hooked, and over two hundred released…two rods with the stripping guides ripped off them…three broken rods,(none of them mine…anyone looking for an indestructible twelve weight should get one of the 8’6″ Redingtons model BWF 86122…if these sharks couldn’t break them, nothing can)…five reels in need of the drags being rebuilt…and four fly lines sent off into the deep. Quite a party. PLEASE….anyone who did this with me this year, send any pictures you have of the sharks.

Some very crummy weather last week kept us mostly inside catching jacks and cudas. The jacks for one of the few times this winter were crashing poppers on the surface, and there are few things that’ll wallop a popper like a ten to fifteen pound jack. The cudas were mostly small ones less than three feet long, but they can still scoot pretty good. Then on tuesday, some much nicer weather moved in and the jacks moved out to places unknown.  So, Wednesdays trip involved some running around to find something to tug on. We found some very hot king mackerel action, nice sized fish in the ten to twenty pound range. Reminisent of the hot bite in january, we had several hook-ups per drift for several hours. But that afternoon, the sharks warmed up to a decent frenzy, hooking about a dozen.  I thought that was good, but it didn’t come close to what happened yesterday.  Every shark fly, and everything that looked like a shark fly was destroyed in a matter of hours. I don’t know how many sharks we hooked, but it was one of the top five days on the spinners I’ve ever had. We were being engulfed by massive clouds of them, schools of sharks over a hundred strong.  With almost flat calm conditions and crystal clear water, I would have given anything for a video camera.  The show was incredible. Beat the customer to such a frazzle, he had to back out of his second day….”my arms couldn’t take another day like this….”.