Busy, busy, busy….places to be, fish to annoy. Things have been good, very good in fact. The sharks are chewing up a storm, so we’re trying to make up for lost time. Poor weather and abnormal movements of the shark schools made early season fishing for them tricky or nonexistent. But in the last month they have really turned around and the party has been incredible. To the point I even have my wife Julie tying flies! Other targets have been huge schools of bluefish, monster jacks up well into the thirty pound range. We’ve been having fun with small king mackerel on shallow water patch reefs, as well as juvenile amberjacks in the same areas. On days when the seas would allow a bit of a run, I’ve been making the trek up north of Jupiter for the massive schools of spanish mackerel. It is mind boggling the amount of fish in that area year after year, even with all the commercial boats and recreational fishermen taking tons, (literally) of fish each day. and the spanish that we caught were of a good size, fish upwards of six or seven pounds were not a surprise. Bigger king mackerel have started showing up, fish over fifty pounds have been caught in the past couple of weeks. And it looks like the dolphin run is about to get under way, some big schools of peanut dolphin and a decent amount of bigger “phins” are moving in. The cobia fishing has also been good, I heard of a seventy pounder caught last weekend. Thats big for our area, most of those oh, so tasty critters average twenty to forty pounds here. I’m not sure just how long the shark show will continue, with their uncharacteristic patterns this winter, I’m not going to be surprised whatever they do. But I hope to get a few more days, hopefully a week and in my dreams we’ll still be banging them in May. But it looks like we’ll have dolphin and kings and, very shortly, albies to play with when the sharks move on their way. A couple of side stories. Speaking of albies. In February, we were treated to a mini run of summer time sized albies up to about fifteen pounds. Was quite a cool thing, especially considering they were blasting bait on the surface in water less than forty feet of water right outside the inlets. Great fun and a serious eye opener for my guys that don’t normally get to see the boneheads. Those little kings I was speaking of put on a serious airial display a couple of times. For those of you who don’t know, when kings feed on the surface, they have the tendency to overshoot their target. This results in the king launching itself a decent distance in the air. The bigger the king, the higher they go. We call this a “skyrocket.” These little kings were so voracious a couple of days, multiple kings would line up on the fly and there would be two foot long grey missiles coming out of the water all around the fly during the retrieve. On every retrieve, the kings would connect, and you would be looking UP at a king eight to ten feet in the air with your fly crossways in their jaws. There has been too many really cool things over the past couple of months, (I know I haven’t been keeping up with the reports, but as I’ve said many times before, if there are no reports, you can be certain the fishing is very good) to tell all of them. Shots at some of the biggest tripletails I’ve ever seen, encounters with sailfish, and a beautiful wahoo we boated. But the coolest thing I’ve seen happened just last week. I was watching what I think was a spinner shark about eighty pounds chasing a bluefish around on the surface about eighty feet from the boat. Just about the time I’m wondering if he would eat a fly if I dropped one on him from that distance, all hell broke loose. Apparently, Mr. Spinner screwed up and wasn’t paying attention. Because a massive, fifteen foot long and every bit of a six to eight hundred pound hammerhead shark sneaks up and blasts the spinner. The first strike, Mr. T-head comes completely out of the water with the spinner in his mouth. The spinner manages to escape, but only temporarily. The T-head is charging around in hot pursuit of the spinner which is leaving a plume of blood behind it in the water. I would never have believed that a shark of this size could get moving that fast. The spinner never had a chance. The hammerheads nails it twice more and the spinner is toast. The last sight of the spinner I got it was crossways in the hammerheads jaws, the beast swimming on the surface looked just like a monster dog carrying a bone. This all happens in about twenty seconds, with my customers freaking, and I admittedly gawking, and the video camera laying there, I missed the whole thing. It was really a reminder that Everything is in the food chain.