“Absolutely the wildest stuff I’ve ever seen”. I’ve heard that phrase a bunch of times in the past month. I can’t do justice with written words to describe the melee’ that has been happening in the area around Palm Beach, and even video would only scratch the surface.
Huge schools of bait have been everywhere, small sardines mostly with small pilchards and glass minnows mixed in. And everything under the sun just hammering away at them. Sailfish, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, jacks, bluefish, ladyfish, tuna, false albacore, sharks and barracuda. And when I say the bait has been everywhere, I mean from horizon to horizon, tens of thousands of birds diving and chasing bait fish that have been pushed to the surface by an equal or greater number of predators. Bait fish showering across the surface, explosions as far as the eye can see.
The bad news is I’ve been in the process of moving into a new house in Jupiter Fl. and have had almost no time to enjoy this spectacular show. And the few times that I have been in the middle of this insanity, the video camera was not in attendance. This past Tuesday was the most recent. With my customers onboard, we saw schools of sardines so tightly packed by rampaging Spanish mackerel, the top of the school of bait was being lifted out of the water and the uppermost bait fish was suffocating. Drifting past, I was able to reach out with just the dip net for my live well and scoop up a full net of sardines. I’d turn around and throw the whole thing as far as I could and instantly there would be a hundred mackerel in the air. The few remaining baits would cluster around the boat trying to hide, and as the wind pushed us away from the main school, the mackerel would follow the boat until they had picked off every last straggler. Then, after I had dropped my guys off, I went back out to watch the show some more before heading home and was drifting along when a huge pod of bait tried to use the boat for shelter from a school of about two thousand jack Crevalle in the eight to fifteen pound range. The attack went of for half an hour, with the boat centered in an acre patch of foaming white water, jacks crashing, minnows flying. The sound was deafening. Like standing next to Niagra Falls.  The deck of the boat was covered with hundreds of minnows that had jumped in attempting to escape. And I am just kicking myself for not having the video camera.

Here we go again. Another storm came through, and Wilma was quite a storm. Easily stronger and more destructive than last years storms. The hundred mile an hour plus winds at my house were quite impressive and a little disturbing. Trees shredded, roofs wrecked, yada,, yada, yada. I stood in the lee of the house and took video of tree limbs flying past, and trees splintering in my neighbors yard. The video is pretty cool, but the actual feeling that one gets from being in a storm like that just doesn’t come through on the film.
The boat is fine however and I even fished the two days following the storm finding massive schools of jacks just off the beach. We even made it out to dolphin country and caught a couple of those. Since then, schools of Spanish mackerel, jacks, bluefish, ladyfish and even a few spinner sharks have been moving into the area. So, it looks like winter fishing may start a bit early this year, and that’ll be a great thing if we can just finish the hurricane season without another visiting south Florida.

September? No way!! Holy crap!! Where did this summer go?!? Oh, yeah, I remember now. It went blazing by with an estimated 4500 albie releases. It got to the point I was soaking my hands in ice water every night, due to the line cuts and sores from grabbing too many fish. Twelve broken rods, nine lines lost and over a thousand flies tied by yours truly. Some of the best midsummer dolphin fishing in the past several summers with a lot of big dolphin around early and then late in the summer. We boated one just this past week that was close to thirty lbs. This bodes well for the fall fishing as it is generally a more typical time for dolphin to come through. Kingfish, assorted runners,(probably another 2500 blue, bar and rainbow runner releases) providing light tackle options when needing a break from the ablie onslaught. Blackfin tuna were a little scarce, and the few big ones we did manage to hook were all blasted by bull sharks. Oh, yeah, the bull sharks were relentless in June, packs of them coming to the boat before we even started chumming. I need to figure out a way to dissuade them from bothering me next year. We had great weather over all, didn’t cancel a single trip and only had a couple days inside the ICW due to rough water on the ocean. Snook were good in August, tarpon are just getting back into the area on their southward migration. The normal tarpon fishing in June and early July was lackluster with bad water quality for sight casting and fewer than normal tarpon from what everyone was saying. There are some very good guides in the area that spend considerably more time on the silver kings than I do and when hearing how tough it was to get results, I opted for more reliable results with the reef chumming. There quite a few memorable events, an enormous cobia lost after an epic hour long fight, a weeks time where from horizon to horizon albies crashing flying fish, a seventy fish day on albies in only thirty feet of water, a six foot long barracuda ripping an albie out of my hands just as I was picking it up out of the water,(that one was a little scary, the cuda was going about fifty when he hit)) just too many stories to relate. And this brings me back to the start of the fall bait migration/mullet run kicking off. The first schools of mullet, ladyfish, bluefish and jacks showed up this week, crashing in schools of bait so large as to be mind boggling. I threw the net on just such a school pilchards and sardines last week, and the net could not close, over a thousand pounds of bait in one shot. I hope the hurricane season finishes without us wearing one, I’m looking forward to a fall season of inshore and offshore fun with snook, tarpon, jacks, dolphin, skipjack tuna and what ever else we find. Spinner sharks should be along shortly.

This is easily my favorite months of the year with a great species list and usually very dependable weather. The weather has thrown us some curves though, a tropical storm has already made a drive by, dousing us pretty well. But I can put up with less than normal South Florida weather when the snook are heating up, tarpon traveling through, albies on the war path,(the albies showed up in mid may in good numbers, almost a month early from last year) big dolphin making appearances, king mackerel here and there, rainbow and blue runners, bull sharks mugging the hooked fish, blackfin tuna, wahoo and sailfish in the area. About as “target rich” an environment as anyone could want. We’ve boated dolphin up to about twenty pounds, and missed some real bruisers in the thirty and forty pound range. Albie size range has been all over the place with two to eighteen pounds coming over the side. We haven’t boated/released any of the tarpon yet, but have launched some skyward that were well over the hunderd pound mark, including one about a hundred thirty pounds that was so close to coming in the boat on one jump, she soaked us with spray. Nothing quite like looking up at a fish six foot long, gills rattling, head thrashing. Now if we can only get through hurricane season without getting smacked…. With daylight savings leaving plenty of light to fish with past eight PM, this time of year is like being a kid in a candy shop…I just can’t stop myself from fishing. So, if I’m not regular with the reports, you’ll know I’m just fishing my brains out…. This will be the main fish menu for the next six weeks at least.

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.

I’m going to start calling this time of year the “Season of teeth”. Seems like toothy critters outnumber everything else by three to one right now. Baracuda, bluefish, sharks, spanish and king mackerel. There are other non-toothy fish playing as well, jacks, pompano, ladyfish. I am getting a little tired of the unusually poor weather we’ve been getting this winter though, nice fishing weather for a few days, then five days of screaming winds. At the time of this writing, the wind is again blowing hard. We managed a very respctable day yesterday despite the wind(20 knots sustained, gusts over 30) with six cudas up to three feet long, eight jacks up to about six lbs and a couple of small snook, which were a big surprise with the cold water. Maybe we’ll get all the wind out of the way and the spring fishing will be nice with calm seas. Last spring we had incredibly windy weather and April and May passed with alot of the years best dolphin fishing being unreachable. My main target this time of year is the spinner sharks, those rabid-tarpon, whirling dervishes, “I’m getting my butt kicked” fish that I love so much. Perhaps it’s the unusual weather, but they are late. Normally very punctual in arriving the first week of January, here it is the end of the month and I just saw the first good group showup a few days ago. Thank god, I thought I would need to find a threapist if the sharks didn’t show soon. I’m hoping the late arrival will mean a late departure. The historic date the spinners leave is the first week of April. Some other very odd occurances are also worthy of note for the winter season. There has been a very good showing of blue marlin and yellowfin tuna recently. The first are typically way too big,(averaging 250 lbs to start) to even attempt on fly, the later is a species we never see here. The yellowfins prefer the east side of the gulf stream, and it would please me to no end if we would continue to have some in the area. They are a spectacular fighting fish, easily one of the fastest and toughest of the tuna species. That is all the news from my corner of the pond.

I had no idea it had been almost three months since I posted a fishing report. There has been a lot going on, unfortunately not enough of it has been fishing. Right after my last update, Hurricane Jeanne came through our area on a carbon copy of the track Hurricane Frances followed. Same amount of wind and rain, only difference was Jeanne moved considerably faster and damaged was minimal. I really feel for the homes left with roof damage from Frances. The rain from Jeanne was what really wrecked everything left exposed from the first storm. And shortly after Jeanne, the remnants of Hurricane Ivan moved back over the area with more rain, though little wind. In August no one would have believed we would get three hurricanes in the same month. Most would count it all as a really rude wakeup call living in the tropics can mean. Call it good timing if you will, in the middle of all this, in early October, I had surgery on my left shoulder to correct what thirty plus years of stripping fly line caused. A bone spur removed, slight tear in the rotator cuff attended to, and the removal of, in my Dr.’s words “a surprising amount of Bursitis.” My own form of Fly fishing Carpal Tunnel syndrome I guess. I’ll call it good timing on the surgery because we couldn’t really fish during the storms obviously and the calls for trips pretty much ceased immediately after. I got the green light from the Dr. to go back to work around the 15th of Nov, and I was out the door like a shot. I don’t suffer convalescence gracefully to put it mildly. To tell the truth, only twelve days after the surgery I was wading streams in the Texas hill country fishing for Guadalupe bass. Good thing they max out in size at about ten inches, right up my ally considering my condition. But home is where the heart is and I was drooling to get back out on the water here in Florida. In the interim of the storms coming through and my recovery, winter fishing patterns have come on strong. In the dozen or so trips I’ve done since getting back to work, southward migrating tarpon, winter schools of jack crevalle of all sizes, small tuna and dolphin offshore, spanish mackerel, ladyfish and bluefish have all been encountered. Probably the coolest thing going on this past week was the first wave of sailfish showing up. While a decent number were moving through the normal travel route along the reef about a mile offshore, a good amount were in very close to shore chasing large schools of ballyhoo. Water depths as little as ten feet of water, the sails could be plainly visible cutting through the baitfish, bills slashing. We haven’t been able to get one to commit to eating a fly yet, but on several occasions one would chase the fly eighty feet back to the boat, whacking it all the way before turning off at the last minute. Enough to get anyone with a pulse weak kneed. In just the past day or so, some much bigger dolphin up into the thirty pound range have started moving through, and I saw my first spinner sharks of the winter free jumping. I plan on catching up on the fishing I’ve missed this fall in a hurry and will have more to write about shortly

As I’ve been saying for a couple years, we’re long overdue here for a hurricane, and when one does come through, it’ll be a hell of a mess. Well, it’s a hell of a mess here. Hurricane Frances came through, taking her time and pretty much wrecked everything except the fishing. I’m sure you’ve all seen the damage it wrought, trees splintered, roofs gone. We were without power for about nine days. That’s a long time without A/C in September. The house, cars and best of all, the boat came through without any damage luckily. While almost everyone has power back, the cleanup will be in progress for a long time. Obviously I haven’t been doing much fishing with this going on, my last charter trip was the week before the storm came through. I made a foray out immediately after the storm to observe the damage. Lots of sailboats now lawn ornaments, lots of docks and yachts now artificial reefs. But the storm didn’t affect the fall mullet run/bait migration in the least. It’s is well underway, lots of action on snook, tarpon, sharks, jacks and other assorted predators harassing the schools of hapless mullet. We even caught bonito in close to the beach yesterday. And so begins the transition from summer to fall fishing, leading soon to winter.

Albies are winding down. There are still a few small ones around, an occaisional big guy, but most have moved on. I didn’t keep good records of numbers from this season, but a total of around 2000 seems about right. Biggest fish were in the eighteen pound range. And judging from the hordes of “small” six to eight pound fish, next year is going to have large numbers of big fish. Now we come into the mixed-bag time of year when the species list gets pretty cool. We had a ten species day this past monday with dolphin, albies, rainbow and blue runners, king and spanish mackerel, jack crevalle, cudas, snook and snapper. About thirty fish plus came over the side. More of the same yesterday, including a dolphin jaunt offshore where we finally found a decent number of dolphin. Small fish in the two to five pound range, we scaled down to six weights to make them a bit more fun. This should be the norm for the next month or so when the fall mullet/bait run gets underway and things should get really nuts with huge schools of bait moving around with an entire entorage of predators following.

We have been having a pretty typical, Albies-out-of-control June and July here in Southeast Florida. Hordes of fish, averaging around ten pounds, fish into the upper teens on a fairly regular basis. My hands look like I’ve been clumsy sharpening my fillet knife from all the line cuts. It’s a wonderful thing. We must be getting good at this thing judging from the lack of broken rods. Only four this year so far. And two reels that had melt downs. We also had some very good tarpon fishing in the area this year. I didn’t get to take advantage of the action as much as I’d like since most of my customers this time of year are “Albie-junkies”, but an excellent guide I know in the area that did concentrate on the silver kings is closing in on his two hundredth of the year. We had a couple days on king mackerel that was a nuts as it gets, with fifteen to forty pound fish blasting chum baits, tearing holes in the water and skyrocketing fifteen feet in the air all around the boat. Dolphin fishing has been lack luster for the most part, few fish and long distances to run to find them, though I think that will be changing next month. Snook at area inlets have been grouping up and we had several this week in the twenty pound range. Things to look forward to next month should be more snook at the inlets, juvenile tarpon in the ICW, sailfish showing in good numbers as in the past four or five Augusts, some of the best chances to get a wahoo of the year, hopefully some dolphin and the albies starting to thin out. This is just a quick report to try to stay up to date with the action here. I’m off on a much deserved break for the next couple of weeks. Tight lines.