I’m back in the Keys fishing this spring and the season has just come to an end for the Boy Scouts camp. No more Scout for a few weeks so we finally get to do a little fishing ourselves! On Friday afternoon just as we were all about to get off work for the day, the boss called us into his office. He told us that his boss’s wife decided to have a fish fry and our orders were to go kill as many dolphin as we could on Saturday. My friend Emily had a posse from Colorado visiting her so we decided to take them out for some pretty green fish.
Saturday morning rolls around and we left the marina at 8:00 am. Ran out to 100 ft and had lines in at 8:20 am. Jealous?
Trolled around from 150-380’ and picked up a few bonita for bait. About 10:30 we had made it out to 550’ and picked up one slinger and started to head shallower to get out of the scattered weeds that were EVERYWHERE. Eventually found a frigate and some terns getting active over top of a log and proceeded to coral some fish with another boat. He was solo and sat next to the log jigging and bailing dolphin. We ended up picking up 7 dolphin and 1 wahoo before I started feeling an ache in my right side. It got to be so bad that I had to call it a day at 1:00 just as the school of dolphin popped up under the boat as we were pulling lines in. We had a 9 mile run back to the channel and I was hurting bad. It got to the point that I was puking from the pain and starting to feel dizzy. Got to the dock and took a shower, sat in the AC and cooled off and 20 minutes later the pain was gone!
Figured out it was a biliary colic, a gall bladder attack. It was a humbling experience as I’ve never experienced anything like that and am glad I was only 9 miles away from home as opposed to 60 miles from the dock…
I’ve never had much luck with wahoo down here as I’ve mainly focused on the dolphin with the Scouts. I started running a planer rod with a bridle and have caught 3 over the past 3 weeks so I’m pretty pleased with the results.
Everyone o
