The Wednesday all day dolphin trip was red hot this week. Captain Stu began trolling offshore, looking for a weedline or something else nice to fish to. High up and off in the distance, we spotted a frigate bird circling and trolled towards it to investigate. When we came closer, another frigate bird came into view circling the same area, flying low to the water. As we trolled close, we got an immediate bite on the short bait, a nice dolphin. Capt. Stu slowed the boat down and we fought the fish. As we got the dolphin close to the boat, we could see a couple more were following. A couple fishermen quickly threw out pitch baits. The following dolphin ate the pitch baits at once. We landed all 3 of those, plus caught another as we trolled near the birds again. All 4 dolphin were 7-8 pounds a piece.
The next hour of the trip was relatively uneventful. We trolled along, had a few mystery bites, but no other fish for a while. The mate onboard, Josh, caught sight of a floating piece of wood. Captain Stu set the boat up on a drift near the log. As soon as we threw the first bait in the water, we could see a couple dolphin fish swim over towards us from underneath the log. We caught the first few right away and picked at them for about 30 minutes, ending up with 10 more dolphin from that school. When we stopped getting bites, we set back up on the troll, heading south along a nicely formed weedline.
We trolled along the weedline for a while with no bites. We were a pretty good ways offshore, so we changed course and began heading in the distance toward the inlet. It was about a half hour of nothing when suddenly every line we had out slammed down hard. With 8 dolphin jumping behind the boat, things got chaotic for a few minutes. Captain Stu could see from his lookout in the wheelhouse that there were dolphin swimming everywhere around the boat. He shut down the engines and yelled to everyone to cast out their pitch baits. Dolphins were around the boat jumping, the ones we just caught were flopping on the deck, it was awesome. Josh, our mate, rigged everyone up with bailing rigs so we could catch them quicker.
We fished on that same drift for over an hour, catching dolphin literally non-stop. The waters around the boat were swarming with streaks of yellow and turquoise as dolphin frenzied and circled the boat. Ones that looked a little small or just barely legal size, we just threw back without measuring. There were so many fish in the boat, everyone on board had caught MANY. Captain Stu looked into the fish box and said, “We gotta stop fishing for a minute and get a count on these fish.” Josh pulled the dolphin out of the fish box, one by one and counted them up. The final count came up at 57 dolphin already boated. The limit per vessel is 60, so we caught 3 more quick dolphin and started up the engines to go home. As we were leaving the area, Captain Stu said it looked like there were 400 dolphin still in the water. We couldn’t keep anymore and it was late in the day so we headed for home.
Since we were headed right past in on the way home, Captain Stu stopped at his favorite snapper hole for one drift. We caught about a dozen vermillion snapper, icing on the cake for a stupendous deep sea fishing adventure. Thanks to all that came and I’m glad you got to experience the awesome rush of finding a gold mine of dolphin offshore. I hope next week is just as good. Sea ya on the water.
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