OK, so it’s been a while since the last entry to the log….What am I, some kind of journalist? Apparently not….But I hope to get a more consistent stream of stories and updates going. Anyhow, lets get to what’s been going on.

Winter fishing is heating up. We’ve had several good cold fronts drop the water temperatures considerably, bringing in all the winter time players. Jacks in all sizes are schooling up at area inlets and out along the beaches. We’ve had several bouts with good sized, fifteen pound and up fish. However, the main trick was getting the jacks to the boat in one piece. The bottlenose porpoise and big bull sharks were relentless in taking hooked fish off the line for us. Kinda neat the first time you see it, but quickly gets rather annoying. But best of all, the sailfish are showing up in very good numbers. I had several shots at sails balling-up bait pods less than a half mile from the inlet in only forty feet of water on Sunday of this week. I didn’t have the equipment I like for doing the sails, and just throwing flies at working fish doesn’t really work, but we tried anyway. Got one to follow a fly, then got one to crash a rubber squid teaser, but didn’t get hooked up to any. Still very neat to watch them chasing bait right next to the boat. The dolphin fishing has continued to be good anytime the offshore ocean is calm enough to get out there. The wind has hampered those efforts to some degree. But for this time of year, that’s to be expected.

One of the more recent trips offshore produced, without a doubt, the strangest catch yet. I was moving along a weedline about five miles off the beach on the morning of the 10th with customer Bill Cotter. We had already put several dolphin in the boat, and I was scanning the weedline ahead for more likely areas to find additional fish. The weedline was very uniform in it’s content, bright yellow Sargasso weed and very little of anything else. So this object I spotted really stood out with it’s spiky outline and black and orange bars. You do any amount of this sort of fishing offshore and you get very good at identifying foreign objects floating a considerable distance away, but this thing was totally alien to me. And then it moved. Finally, a full grown, four and a half foot long iguana materialized out of the pile of weeds it was floating along in. I figured he wasn’t intending to be where he was, so I boated him with my landing net and deposited him in the forward section of the boat. About this time I’m sure my customers thought I had lost my mind, scrambling for cover in the stern. Despite a few cracks with his tail to keep us back in our end of the boat, (he connected with my bare leg once, and he was more than welcome to the front of the boat) he genuinely looked happy to be out of the water. And that’s where he stayed for the remainder of the morning. He stayed there for the ride back in, perked right up when I washed him down with fresh water while cleaning the dolphin, and rode most of the way back to the boat ramp perched up on the bow in full view of several party boats and bridge anglers, which brought more than one incredulous stare. And when I tied up at the dock, Iggy, which I had come to call him, climbed out. He did need a little help from the landing net, but you could almost hear him saying “thank-you”…