Things were pretty wild last week. The annual Gilmore Guys trip went off pretty much without a hitch. Tom Gilmore is a customer who has been fishing with me some six or seven years now. He is from NJ and is so much of an albie junkie that he wrote a very nice and informative book on the subject, (False Albacore, by Tom Gilmore, Countryman Press), pretty much required reading for anyone looking for info on albies. Anyhow, since Tom found out about the massive numbers and sizes of the albies,(not to mention the long season and great weather while they’re here), he’s been bringing groups of anywhere between three and eight northeast fly flingers down in June or July to do extended battle. This year we had seven, including a photographer and a videographer to chronicle the event. I didn’t even bother to count the fish that came into the two boats, but Tom who seems to have a realistic counting method, had a four day total of close to, if not exceeding, four hundred albies. My hand look like I was in a knife fight from leadering fish. Up north, a ten pound albie is considered nice and a twelve pounder a trophy. It got to the point we weren’t even taking pictures of the twelve pounders. Fourteen and sixteen pounders were coming over the side with good regularity, and several seventeen and eighteen pound fish were also accounted for. The one time I picked up a rod,(only at the invitation of my anglers who were all busy with their own fish), I think I managed the biggest albie of the trip at nineteen point five pounds. I was certain it was a blackfin tuna when it hit, one of my favorite eating fish. So, with that incentive, I kicked it’s butt in about ten minutes. It’ll stand probably in my top five biggest albies to date. There were probably a couple hundred blue runners and rainbow runners that were boated as well as several nice dolphin that uncharacteristically were inside the reef mixed in with the albies. A wahoo was lost, I believe several blackfins also and a blue marlin came by the boats once just to give everyone a heart attack. And that is what been coming over the sides of my boat for the past week or so. Other things I haven’t gotten around to are good action on snook, dolphin moving in in bigger numbers, if not bigger sizes, some monster jacks cruising the bait school along the beach and the tarpon continue to chew pretty well from what I’ve been hearing.