I made a five day weekend out of Memorial Day this year and headed south to Florida for 4 days of fishing. The first two days I did a tarpon fly fishing charter out of Islamorada (first time going for tarpon), then the last two I did offshore fishing with my buddy of Cape Canaveral. Sorry for the long post, but I figure at least one person might be interested in hearing about it! :-)
-- My trip started out with a super delayed flight to Miami that got me to my hotel in Islamorada at about 3 AM, which left me about 3 hours of sleep for Friday's trip. Friday turned out to be the best weather - relatively calm winds with flat seas. It made the fishing slightly more challenging because I needed to be more accurate and delicate since the fish could see better. Unfortunately, the lack of sleep must have KILLED my casting skills, because I could hardly hit the broadside of a barn from 10 feet away. My guide was getting a bit frustrated with me (which kind of annoyed me a bit) since he kept getting me into fantastic position to make what should have been an easy cast for me, but I kept on either shooting it way too long or too far away from the fish. I still got a couple follows, but no bites. By the afternoon, I started to get it down. I finally managed to hook about a 100 lber, but unfortunately it broke off after about 5 minutes during a jump. It split the loop the fly was tied onto, so we're guessing the loop somehow got fouled where the eye of the hook comes together and the line got nicked. It was such an incredible fight, even thought it was relatively short lived. On Day 2, my casting skills came back, but the wind picked up like crazy. I was still able to deliver some really nicely placed casts. We got several long follows from the tarpon, but no bites. We had to call the day early because it just got too windy to cast - it was blowing over 20 knots sustained. If anyone is looking for a guide and is experienced in flats fishing, I'd recommend him. If you haven't done it before, I'd look for someone else. I'm happy to give the name privately if you're looking for a recommendation - not sure what the rules would be on posting his name here.
My offshore trip turned out a little different. My friend and I ended up only taking the borrowed boat out Monday since Tuesday got really rough and we were completely worn out by Monday's events. We started off the day with a little nearshore kingfish fishing since it was on the rougher side. We got out to the grounds and saw one catapult itself literally 30 feet into the air chasing bait. Unreal. We spent about an hour catching a couple before the seas laid down a little and we went out to the gulf stream. We ended up on a school of about 25 small mahi mahi (maybe 25" each). It literally looked like it was raining mahi when the school attacked our spread. We got a few in the boat before moving on for bigger fish. We trolled for a while with no action until we saw what we believed to be a sailfish get on our bait. As my buddy was feeding it the bait and setting the hook, another rod goes off with a 25lb mahi mahi. He hands me the sailfish rod, and brings in the mahi and the other 3 lines. We quickly realized we did not have a sailfish when he took over 300 yards of line without even slowing down, and when we saw it jump about 500 yards out. We had a Blue Marlin on the line. To preface this, the owner of the boat is selling it within the next week or so, and without telling my friend, took all my friend's equipment off - fighting harness, gloves, etc., so we only had the tools we brought which we rods, lures, baits, and clippers. A little over two hours later switching off on a relatively light rod, we finally had the 9', 350-400 lb blue marlin at the side of the boat. It was the most incredible, exhausting fight I've ever experienced. I also have a massive bruise from where I had the rod jammed into my hip area during the fight. for those of you familiar with offshore gear, we were using a TLD 30 stand up outfit - which is the same outfit we were using for our main target of mahi-mahi. Unfortunately, getting back to the whole "no gloves" issue, the marlin took a line with a wire leader, so we couldn't handle the leader for fear of losing a few fingers if it surged. Between that, and the issues I had with my camera focusing, the only pictures we were able to get was a blurry one of it jumping and a couple of it several feet beneath the surface on the side of the boat, all attached (hopefully). Needless to say, we went home after the battle since we were both too tired to even lift a rod at that point.
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