By Sam Root of Saltyshores.com
Yesterday I awake at 4:45am to get ready for another fishing trip. I was to meet Jason and Cody in Clearwater Florida to do some offshore fishing today. After a brief stop at one of those Subways that was inside a gas station to pick up some $5 foot long tuna sandwiches for luch, I was there but 6:20am. Since Cody had all
the gear I didn't bring anything except for my camera gear and video equipment. It took us a bit to load the boat and get ice but we finally made it out of Clearwater pass by 8:30 or so.
Finding pilchards for bait was not a problem once we got out there. The pelicans were diving on them pretty hard and it was easy pickings for us. We loaded both live wells with nice size pilchards. With one foot seas in the forecast the plan was coming together nicely. Now it was time for us to find bigger baits for bigger fish, namely blue runners for early season kings.
We found tons of bait on the sonar but for whatever reason they did not want our sabiki rigs today. We tried a couple bait spots on the way out but no luck. Oh well
we had plenty of the pilchards so off we went to our 1st are a spring in about 100+ feet of water. When we first got there we saw something busting up the top pretty
good. We got pretty excited but whatever it was never came back up so we concentrated our efforts towards anchoring properly.
There pere a giant pod of bait all around us. This area was looking great! For the next 3 hours we kept catching, sharks, bonitas, and amber jacks. A pod of blackfin tunas showed up and Cody yells "blackfin!". He was already hooked up to large AJ so it was up to Jason and I. I toss my magic swimmer Sebile and Jason had a knocker rig using the Invisible sinker and we both hooked up. It was a triple hookup!
After we landed the fish I decided to jump into the water with my camera and snorkeling gear. I saw lots of blue runners, bonitas, and rainbow runners all circling out boat and the bait that we used to chum. Along with this were lots of sharks! I was hesitant at 1st but figure these guys want to eat the bait not me. Actualy the shark didn't really both me as much as the the small jelly fish that was stinging me constantly. It was sharp pain but went away after about 40 seconds. The remora was a major pain as well swimming all around. Regardless of this I got some ok photos but these fish were fast! It was tough getting close enough to them for a good photo. The coolest part of the dive was when the shark got aggressive and started to attack the hooked blue runners. I manage to capture one of the attacks on video. It happened like 3' in front of me. Very cool.
After the sharks took over the area, We loaded up on blue runners and made a move deeper. Since our anchor rope was too short to anchored we drifted blue runners and
we to some nice kings in the 25-30lb range. I guess they couldn't find all those blue runners that we did early. They were very skinny but very long. The AJ here were ravenous. We couldn't get a bait passed them many of the time. However if we do happen get the invisible sinker rigs to the bottom we pulled up some nice mangos and red snapper.
The bite was great all day from start to finish. We lost a 40lb king fish on at the 2nd spot and we couldn't anchor. If we could have anchor we would have been able to
use all our bait we had to get more tunas and kings for sure.
It was getting to be sunset and the AJ's just would not leave us along. It was time to head in after a long day of hard fishing. Since I didn't want any of the fish
and had an hour drive home Cody and Jason stayed to clean the boat. I got in about 1030pm and when I talked with Jason this morning they said there were so much fish
he didn't get home til 11pm and he only lives 30minutes away. Lots of fish lots of fun, I'm tired thinking about it.
By Sam Root of Saltyshores.com
