Busy, busy, busy. Summer fishing in high gear. Albies, snook, tarpon, dolphin, tuna and too many bull sharks chasing,(and catching) hooked fish. Things were darn near spectacular since the middle of April, and with very little in the way of interference from poor weather thankfully. Too busy to keep track of the numbers of fish caught, flies tied, etc. I’d hazard a guess we crossed the 1K number of albies landed about the end of May, which is pretty wild since that’s just about the time the albies normally arrive!
A wrench has been thrown into everything this week however, we have a cold water up welling in progress. A normal occurrence during the summer here, strong currents flowing up against the shelf push deep water up to the surface and then in along the beaches and reefs. Divers have been reporting water temps of almost twenty degrees departure from normal on the bottom, and surface temps are cold also. But these things happen fast, and usually go away fast, so it should be short lived….hopefully.
One of the more entertaining things in the past month was a quick over and back one day trip to the western Bahamas with some buddies on their new 25 foot Bluewater. We went in search of skipjack and yellowfin tuna, which we never found in over a hundred and forty miles of searching. We did get a couple of dolphin and a tripletail or two off of floating debris, but not the stuff we were looking for. So when we found an eleven foot, six hundred pound tiger shark cruising on the surface, of course we couldn’t just leave it alone. Sacrificing one of the caught dolphin to the idea, we slashed the dolphin and hung it over the side ala spinner shark technique, and dragged it a short distance to create a scent trail. The tiger hit that trail and came right to the boat. But we just couldn’t get the thing fired up enough to hit the shark fly I kept presenting to it on my fifteen weight. Even after letting it bite the dolphin in half, it just wouldn’t play. So after it slapped the side of the boat with it’s tail and took a couple of exploratory bites at the propeller , I decided to cheat a bit and teach the thing boats weren’t such a good thing to hand around. I brought the fly up to a couple inches of the rod tip, and next time he came close, I reached out and stuck the fly in his nose. And that was the last time we saw it. It headed for the bottom at warp two like a broken elevator cable in four thousand feet of water. And I’m not stupid, or young anymore, so while still on the flyline I popped him off. Even with a fifteen weight, I’m sure Mr. Tiger would have kicked my butt all over the ocean for the rest of the week. A guy has to know his limitations…