Huge Bull Dolphin caught deep sea drift fishing on the Mary B III

We’ve been in the boat yard all week working on the Catch My Drift.  We’re doing some work to her bottom and painting her up so she looks pretty.  The Mary B III, our other drift boat has been running our trips this past week.  We’ve been doing good too, lots of good action.  Yesterday was a great fishing trip.  We were catching some bonitos and a few kings.  Not bad action.  We also caught a couple medium sized mutton snappers.  I got a report from the night guys that we’re catching tons of mutton snappers at night.  Most of them, and I mean like 90% or better of them, aren’t keeper sized.  Just a hair under legal so they are ‘happy snappers’.  At least everyone has been catching fish at night though.  Lots of action and everyone has been catching them.

Well, anyway, back to my story about yesterday’s trip.  We were catching kings, snappers, and bonitos when somebody hooks up with a huge cow dolphin.  This fish was about a 23 pounder.  Then another cow gets hooked up at the same time.  These were big fish and we were fishing in kinda shallow water for dolphin so we weren’t expecting these fish to bite.  o we go 2 dolphin on and the captain yells, “might be a couple more out there, keep fishing”.  We’ve still got the other 2 dolphins on the line, and then we see the ‘Bull’ of the school.  This fish was huge.  He was pushing a water wake with his big head, right on the surface of the water.  A couple guys threw out a ballyhoo, to catch him,  but he swam right past them.  He was all honed in on a sardine that was near the surface. 

When the bull dolphin took the bait, he jsut started swimming away casually like he didn’t even know he was hooked.  We tightened the drag a tiny bit and BAMMO!  He jumps out of the water like a frikken blue marlin!  We fought this fish for over 40 minutes.  During the fight we hooked into another 20+ pound cow dolphin but pulled the hooks on that one.  During the fight of the big bull, we got the other 2 cows close enough to gaff and we got them in the boat.  Danny, one of our regulars(a skinny guy that weighs about 90 pounds soaking wet) caught the bigger of the 2 cows, about 23-25 pounds.  He was so out of breath that he had to go sit inside the rest of the trip to calm down.  Larry, another one of our regulars caught the other cow, probably a 20-22 pounder.  Larry is about 7 foot tall and pure muscle and even he got a little winded catching his dolphin. 

The big bull was landed by David Halem, on his first trip fishing with us.  After a brutal fight he got him into the boat.  This fish was massive.  Probably the biggest dolphin we’ve caught the whole year out here.  We guessed the bull to weigh a little over 35 pounds.  Congats to everyone who fished with us yesterday, we don’t have fishing trips in Fort Lauderdale like that very often.  We felt like we were fishing in Costa Rica or something.  Anyway, enjoy the photos.  I’ll post what we caught today in tommorrows fishing report.  I gotta get back to the boat yard and paint the Catch My Drift.  She’s gonna look purdy when she gets out of the boat yard.  Should be Wednesday when we get back with her.  Cya all later!