We headed on out with frosty bait but no fresh lively ones. I had my new Lowrance Elite 5 Gold on the boat for it's first trip so I wasn't sure what to expect from it and I'm still wandering through the menus figuring it all out but it proved to be a great new addition to the boat. We hit an artificial reef in about 85 feet that proved to hold about half the sharks in the Gulf evidently. We were not chumming but we could see 6 of them swimming near the surface around us at one time and every drop got eaten by a 3 to 4 foot shark. I did manage to put a nice king in the boat on this spot skipping a cigar minnow while motoring around looking for the reef. The darn thing hit before I had let the rig half way back and put up a couple of screaming runs. I put it back out hoping to get the boy a nice king but it was shark attack for Pierce as usual.
We gave up on the toothy feeding frenzy and moved a good way to a group of spots in 97 feet of water. It took a while looking around and drifting baits but I finally found a really good looking show on the machine which saved our day. Every drift over the area yielded a variety of fish. We had my Stratic 4000 rigged with a 4/0 live bait hook hoping a dolphin (mahi) would show up. On our last trip we caught several this way. A mahi did show up and Pierce put a chunk of cigar minnow on the hook while I fed it tiny chunks of tossed bait. He hooked up and had a blast with it. It was a little larger than our average chicken mahi around here. On the bottom we were bringing up black, red, and vermilion snapper. The largest reds were about 10 pounds and the black and vermilion were thick and fat ones too. We never got a single grouper though.
It was getting late in the afternoon by now and I see something unusual swim by. I realized it was a mahi but looked a good bit bigger than the average chicken and peanut mahi we get in the area on artificial reefs under 100 feet. It was swimming away fast. I grabbed a rod I had a 2 ounce cobia jig on and tossed it past the phin. I worked it back as erratic as I could and the phin swung around and got behind it with the twirl tail tickling it's nose all the way back. I ran the jig down the side of the boat and the mahi finally grabbed it with me looking straight down at it. Off it went stripping line and making very impressive flips and jumps that looked higher than our heads. Another boat fishing the area decided to go in and ran by us to see what was up. The boat running by put the phin down and he went deep. About 20 minutes later Billy finally stuck the gaff in it. We got a few pictures and went back to bottom fishing as it was nearing time for us to be headed in considering we had to drive home. We threw back some decent red snapper and added a vermilion. Unfortunately we somehow miscounted our red snapper and ended up with 5 instead of 6 in the box when we got home. DOH! I sure would love to have back one of those we threw back!
It was a great day though with some good fish in the box for a boat full of amateurs. On that last spot we shared it with a HUGE sea turtle that floated around for about 3 minutes near us. The bottom machine worked great. Thanks to Ranaman for helping me install it! The seas were pretty much 1 feet all day with a little bit more as we came in that evening but nothing rough at all which was a drastic change from most of my other trips this year!
