I went out on the Miss Emily this past Saturday (9/11) and we had a great time. The ride out was like being on a lake and we were in 90’ in no time at all. The ledge we were fishing was about a 15’ relief over a short area so we caught fish from 75 to 90’ constantly until the ringtails moved in in a big way. We went from pulling up doubles of trigger, fat BSB, and vermilion every drop to 3 ringtail every drop so we decided to move out. We dropped a camera down and saw the triggers and vermilion were still there but they were hugely outnumbered by the ringtails.
We then moved deeper to some lobster numbers and didn’t find any bugs but did find lots and lots of grouper in 110’. They didn’t eat any hooks but they did find spring steel rods disagreeable. Sadly the lionfish were everywhere as well. Out of all the grouper we only saw one ARS.
After that dive we decided to move the boat to get a better position on all of the grouper we found on the reef but we then found what looked like a turtle with a flipper stuck in the air so we moved in to investigate. What we found was a very long bamboo tree complete with shoots and lots of marine growth covered in fish and being circled by a huge school of dolphin of all sizes. We parked our boat on top of it and managed to hook a handful of the schoolies using our chicken rigs somehow. They then seemed to shy away from our rigs despite chumming with squid so I broke out the spear gun and did some free diving and did manage to shoot two very good sized cows (not having a float line on the spear, I avoided the huge bulls) however equipment failure caused both fish to quickly pull off and so I stopped puncturing them and switched to enjoying free swimming with a huge school of curious dolphin (mahi mahi).
Also, yes we kept some of the small schoolies because most of the people on the boat had never even seen dolphin before so this was a special occasion and unexpected for a bottom fishing trip.
Good times.
