Don’t have alot to tell over the past week or so. At the beginning of the month we had good action on skipjack tuna, nice fish in the five to ten pound range with a few larger fish mixed in. Skippies, as we call them, are great fish. Very fast, I think they’re considerably faster than a false albacore, even the little five pounders will dump about a hundred yards on the first run. But they can be very challenging even for accomplished anglers. They are very boat shy, unless you have a ton of chum, they usually insist on a long cast. And they can be very selective, if your fly isn’t a dead-on match, they will probably just ignore you. But about a week ago, the wind started in and we’ve been looking at a very angry ocean. Wave heights were running between five and ten foot, pretty ugly fly fishing conditions. Fishing inside the intracoastal waterway has been a bit slow, but we’ve managed a few tarpon,(twenty to forty lbs.) and a few jacks,(five to ten lbs.). Today we had five inches of rain fall in just twelve hours, a good bit of rain even for here. The weather is forcasted to moderate somewhat, and we’ll be able to get back to work.

Well, looks like the wind has decided to blow for a few days here in S. Fl. As I write this, the wind is a steady twenty two knots with gust over thirty. It had been such a calm winter by our standards, we were overdue for some wind. In the long run, this sort of thing is good. Turns up the water, moves the fish around, and when it finally stops blowing there should be some entertaining stuff to do. Before the weather took a dive at the end of last week, we had been treated to some of the most prolonged skipjack tuna action I had seen in a long time. These speedsters do not usually hang around for more than a day or two. But we had about six days in a row with consistent action on them. A very fast, and boat shy fish, the skippies were crashing piles of sargasso weed, feeding on very small baitfish less than an inch long. Needless to say, flies were the only way to get hooked up. I luckily had a couple of decent casters capable of get a long, fast cast where it needed to be and we managed fish everyday. Average size was six to ten lbs. though I did manage a twelve pounder on an eight weight rod. That particular fish dumped almost two hundred yards of line on the first run…did I mention they were fast? Towards the end of the time the weather would allow us out after them, the skippies became very spooky and even with good casts and dead-on match flies, stopped cooperating. On the last day with them, I saw at least three individual blue marlin harrasing them, and other big boats in the area managed to hook a couple of the marlin. I guess I’d be in a bad mood too if there was ten feet of marlin chasing me around.