The past two months have just flown by. Alot of fish have come and gone. Encounters with sailfish, wahoo and more blackfin tuna than I have ever seen here. I would like to say we boated all three of those species, but I can’t. Saw, hooked, played, yes. Boated, no. Even I had Murphy chewing on my ass, I blew shots at three sailfish all in the space of about thirty seconds. Lost blackfin tuna, world record skipjack tuna, had fifty pound wahoo swimming around the boat that wouldn’t eat. It certainly has been entertaining. I was very worried about the false albacore this year. They showed up late and the numbers seemed way down. The first wave of fish really started chewing,(they had been here for several weeks, but had been very uncooperative) about the middle of june. There were days that if you didn’t want to be fighting an albie, you didn’t dare put your fly in the water. Other days, the depthfinder would be just black with fish, but they wouldn’t come up and play, or eat a deep drifted fly. Very annoying. But, they finally got with the normal program and we’re still banging the crap out of them here in the middle of august. And judging from the huge schools of medium sized fish, next year should be a very good year for trophy sized, fifteen pound and up fish. Unless things change and we get another round with the big guys this year, we’ll finish out the season with about twenty some odd albies over fifteen lbs, at least a dz. over seventeen lbs and four twenty pound monsters. That’s just what we were able to get to the boat without coming off the hook or getting eaten on the way up by something larger. I hope to get a few more shots at the blackfin tuna that were in good supply in july, there were times that twenty five to forty pounders were crashing around the boat just like jumbo albies. We usually get another run in the fall when they all come back past heading south. What seems to be a typical August run of sailfish and wahoo is going on now, as well as some good tarpon and trophy snook fishing. That will be the main items on the menu until the fall bait migration kicks in towards the end of September. If you haven’t seen the mullet run,(thats just what we call it here, there are also glass minnows, sardines, herring and pilchards all running south along the beaches) it is truly a spectacular sight to behold. Huge schools of baitfish with every imaginable predator species following. Huge jacks, tarpon, snook, sharks and even sailfish and king mackerel in shallow water along the beaches chasing bait. The timing on this event changes every year depending on the weather, but mid september through october is about right.

Tarpon in assorted sizes have been in the area in fairly large numbers. We haven’t been getting much cooperation out of the larger fish that are in good sized groups out along the beach, have only gotten a handful of strikes and put a couple in the air, but that’s tarpon fishing. But anytime you have a six foot long fish in your sights, the adrenaline gets pumping pretty good. The little guys inside the ICW have been consistently eating though for anyone who really wants to get one. Been able to get some snook chummed up, but like everything else, they’re really not chewing well yet. A few king mackerel are being caught, and there are some truly huge jack crevalle cruising the bait schools out along the beach. The only really hot action recently has been provided by the false albacore. This past Sunday they put on a spectacular show, there were albies crashing the surface as far as the eye could see. It looked like a hail storm with ten pound hail stones hitting the surface! Flying fish running for their lives, big head wakes right under them. And when the flyer touched down, boom! I had a couple of really die hard anglers out, Andy and Carlos from Pittsburgh, Pa. for four days. And after some less than cooperative weather and lackluster fishing, these guys really made up for it on Sunday. We fished until the t-storms really got going late in the afternoon. I think they boated better than forty albies between the two of them, with nothing under ten pounds and the big fish of the day being a massive seventeen pounder. That’s only a pound off the world record. Yesterday, the albies weren’t quite as wild, but it was still fish at will. And we boated an even larger albie which I didn’t weight. I was getting worried that the albies weren’t going to put in an appearance like normal this year. They are only about a month late showing up in numbers. Hopefully this means they’ll be a month late leaving.

We’re still getting less than desirable weather, some days I get off the boat, I just want to go find a weatherman and kick his…. “Weather forecasting” is getting to be as big an oxymoron as “jumbo shrimp”… But we’ve been doing OK, some big dolphin, some very nice albies, a good number of shots at very large tarpon, some very big snook. Have done a few night trips, saw literally a hundred snook each night. Did not get much cooperation at that time, there was very little current and they were not on the feed. The large snook have congregated at area inlets very well, and we boated several nice ones last week. There are more jumbo sized tarpon in the area than I can remember seeing in years. Offshore has been a little lack luster, big dolphin have been the mainstay, kings and albies there also, but not quite in numbers we should have…yet. Had a truly epic battle with a fifteen lb dolphin last Friday. Customer Tim Larkin hooked it up on an eight weight and had quite a fight on his hands for almost an hour. I’ve rarely seen a dolphin more hell bent on getting away. This one did some nice jumps and couple of short little runs and then sounded and spiraled eighty feet down. Tim stuck with him and eventually got him to the boat. We also had a huge surprise last Thursday with Hunter Johnson, he caught a five pound dolphin. That wasn’t the surprise, where he caught it was. Right at the mouth of Palm Beach Inlet!! Swimming right along with the snook and tarpon. I saw several there, so I don’t think they were lost.There is still a few blackfin and skipjack tuna around…one evening, I lost a skippie probably the largest I’ve ever had hooked. Over twenty pounds, I f! ought him about twenty minutes, and lost him to something with teeth. Not sure what ate him, the next one I hooked got chopped in half next to the boat by a monster wahoo. The remains weighed about ten lbs. I’m still seeing sailfish almost everyday, but still haven’t made the time to drag teasers for them. That’s it in a nutshell.

If we  can just get away from this wind, everything would be great. On the few days the seas layed down enough to get offshore, there has been rapidly increasing false albacore action, big dolphin, a few blackfin and skipjack tuna, sailfish and cobia…. quite a full plate. But, with the passage of not one, but two cold fronts this month,(we normally don’t get cold fronts in south FL. during May), the wind has been a-blowin. All these fish have been very close to the inlets, less than a couple miles. But thats a very long couple of miles when the seas are running six to ten feet high. We made it offshore two days last week. On the first day, we found decent numbers of false albacore and did ok, boating approx. six fish in the ten to fourteen pound range. The second day, we started off with an epic battle with some large denizen, probably a tuna, possilbly a amberjack, that the sharks tracked down and killed thirty minutes into the fight. Very annoying. But we almost immediately got into some nice, big dolphin in the twenty pound range, which took away the sting of losing the first fight. Then the wind blew us off the water. That was last tuesday and haven’t been offshore since. Tarpon, jacks, cudas and a few snook have been keeping us entertained since. The weather is supposed to moderate this week and we can get back out there. Places to go, fish to annoy…

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.

How very annoying….I went and dumped a bunch of money on a really nice digital video camera to film the spinner sharks with, and of course, they move out the very next day. And by move out, I mean a mass evacuation. Not a shark left within twenty miles as far as I can tell. Oh well….it was great while it lasted. Can’t wait till next year. So, it’s on to the other springtime menu of first king mackerel, then dolphin and then the albies. We already have had several good days fishing the kings over the past month, and a couple of dolphin encounters. Both of these should continue to get better over the next month or two, and by mid May the albies should be on the rampage. With water temps already in the high seventies, it’ll be interesting to see just how early all this happens. We typically have low seventy degree water at this time, but it’s been a warm winter. This, hopefully, will also get the tarpon in a cooperative mood early. So, I guess it’s time to start pumping out a bunch of Eatme flies, over the course of the next six months I’ll tie over a thousand of them. For anyone interested, the March/April issue of Flyfishing in Saltwater has a very flattering article written about yours truly by Capt. Adam Redford. Also for any local Floridians, or anyone finding themselves in the Ft. Lauderdale area in late April, I’ll be one of the guest speakers at the Shallow Water Expo held at the Broward Co. Convention center April 20th and 21st. This is usually a great show with a bunch of good speakers like Lefty Kreh, Flip Pallot, Jose Wejebe, ect. I think I’ll have an “End of the Shark Party” party with the other guys who played with them over the past three months….we’ll drink a toast and reminisce about the bloody knuckles, cramped up arms, and broken/abused tackle. I think my final totals on the sharks were over five hundred hooked, and over two hundred released…two rods with the stripping guides ripped off them…three broken rods,(none of them mine…anyone looking for an indestructible twelve weight should get one of the 8’6″ Redingtons model BWF 86122…if these sharks couldn’t break them, nothing can)…five reels in need of the drags being rebuilt…and four fly lines sent off into the deep. Quite a party. PLEASE….anyone who did this with me this year, send any pictures you have of the sharks.

Some very crummy weather last week kept us mostly inside catching jacks and cudas. The jacks for one of the few times this winter were crashing poppers on the surface, and there are few things that’ll wallop a popper like a ten to fifteen pound jack. The cudas were mostly small ones less than three feet long, but they can still scoot pretty good. Then on tuesday, some much nicer weather moved in and the jacks moved out to places unknown.  So, Wednesdays trip involved some running around to find something to tug on. We found some very hot king mackerel action, nice sized fish in the ten to twenty pound range. Reminisent of the hot bite in january, we had several hook-ups per drift for several hours. But that afternoon, the sharks warmed up to a decent frenzy, hooking about a dozen.  I thought that was good, but it didn’t come close to what happened yesterday.  Every shark fly, and everything that looked like a shark fly was destroyed in a matter of hours. I don’t know how many sharks we hooked, but it was one of the top five days on the spinners I’ve ever had. We were being engulfed by massive clouds of them, schools of sharks over a hundred strong.  With almost flat calm conditions and crystal clear water, I would have given anything for a video camera.  The show was incredible. Beat the customer to such a frazzle, he had to back out of his second day….”my arms couldn’t take another day like this….”.

Some very entertaining stuff happening over the past month. Fishing has been pretty damn good, with just enough slow days to make the good days oh, so sweet. And I’ve been lucky to have had some great people to do it all with. Had Andy Bayne and his fishing buddy Carlos from Pittsburgh, Pa. out in the middle of January during some very un-seasonal warm/calm summer-like weather. The jacks were good, fish in the five to twelve pound range cooperating well almost anytime we wanted. But the majority of the four days we fished were spent on the spinner sharks. I didn’t keep accurate totals, but I think they hooked upwards of thirty sharks, boating nine. The sharks had chosen a particular stretch of beach near a good number of condo’s to hang out, and they restricted their patrol routes to less than fifty feet off the beach. Needless to say, there were very few bathers in the water. I’m sure anyone living in those condo’s were well aware of the “big, brown fish” in close to the beach. We saw several sharks passing between bathers and dry sand less than twenty feet away.   So, we set up and brought the sharks in on the chum trail and proceded to hook them up, sending them jumping and running in all directions. This would immediately draw quite a crowd.  And when we released a shark, we would get a resounding cheer from the “gallery”. It still amazes me the number of times someone from the beach would yell out” What kind of fish is that?” Yelling back “Shark!” would get some pretty funny looks. Also during that time we were treated to a very early season king mackerel blitz. Late February through April is the typical time for kings here, I can’t remember a January run of the line- dumpers, and we hooked fish on almost every drift through the fleet. And a serious fleet of boats it was sitting on top of this large school of king mackerel. Close to a hundred boats were in on this party, commercial king boats, charter boats, and with it being a weekend, huge numbers of “weekend warriors”. And the sweetest thing of all was having the other boats just drop-jawed shocked to see fly rods doubled over with one, two and once a triple header at almost all times while their livebaits were going untouched. I think they’re still scratching their heads over that one. The kings moved on pretty soon after that, but the jacks and sharks have stayed and intersperced with some tarpon, some night-time snook, a few magnum sized cudas, continue to be the menu for the forseeable future.  We’ve crossed the thousand fish mark on jacks this winter, and I’m not certain on the number of sharks hooked, but judging from the number of shark flies I’ve tied, it must be close to two hundred and fifty, boating less than thirty pecent of those. False albacore have already started to make an appearance, about as early as I’ve ever heard of. I hear the dolphin in the keys have started to pick up, which means their imminent arrival here. And an impressive number of wahoo have been reported offshore. Just a few things to look forward to.

A rapid procession of cold fronts have really heated up the fishing here. Some very entertaining stuff, if I do say so myself. The tarpon played nicely this week, we boated several, the largest being just short of fifty pounds. Baracuda also put on quite a showing, they’ve started hanging in warm water areas, and sight casting to pods of as many as twenty, three to five foot long cudas has produced some great sport. The schools of jack crevalle just keep getting bigger and bigger. Most of the jacks are running four to ten pounds and are great nine weight fare, though there are occaisional encounters with jacks over twenty pounds. A deep drifted “eatme” streamer fly gets smacked pretty fast, but they’ve been shy of hitting anything on the surface for some reason. Normally, poppers and surface flies like sliders, crease flies and fur-head mullet imitations get a good deal of attention, and the resulting surface strikes are spectacular. I’m sure they’ll get around to it sometime soon. The ladyfish are also enjoying the cooler water temps and are cooperating pretty well. Running two to four pounds, they are perfect six weight stuff. And finally, the sharks have come back to town. Though the surf and seas haven’t allowed me to really get out there and play with the sharks, I’m hoping their late arrival will mean a late departure and they’ll be here for the rest of the winter. Truly the most out of control animal you can hook on fly in florida, these “whirling dervishes” can thrill even a seasoned angler.