Spent the past 8 days in Isla Mujeres and Cancun with Skinny and our ladies.
Had a blast Freediving (no tanks) and speared fish up to 70’ deep. The local freedivers down there are amazing at shooting fish.
Did a really cool tank dive into a offshore spring. It was like a hole in the bottom of the ocean. Lots of big Cubera snapper.
I passed up several 30 pounders trying to get close to the bigger ones. Followed them down into the spring to 130’ but no dice. I didnt shoot anything great but sure had the opportunity.
Caught 20 sailfish on the Bi-Op-sea. The girls reeled in the majority of them. I spent most of my time in the water taking pics and video.
It was really amazing to watch the sails work a bait ball until every last sardine was gone. Had several close calls, they got so close i even pet one.
The girls jumped in to see the action too using me as a shield
Nice pics. Had a white tip scare the crap out of me doing that last year. The boat I was on let me take a tank each day and drop in 100’. Grouper and snapper glore.
That looks like a lot of fun. Pics and video are awsome.
Mark
Mako 262 Twin Yammaha F200s
Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal? I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way.
“Life’s tough…It’s even tougher if you’re stupid” John Wayne
that is so interesting. i cant beleive the bait does that down there. makes me want to get in and look around myself. how much does a camera like that run
That is awesome, some friends and I were down there the days of Feb17-25 fishing with Grant on the Home Run. Isla was awesome, I’m def going back again next year in Feb.
Cool video. How much did ya’ll troll and how much did ya’ll pitch when fishing?
JIYC, they don't really pitch in isla. They established some funny etiquette down there years ago. I suspect that some of it is legacy, but at one time pitchng J-hooks to sails probably ended up with a lot of gut hooked fish. Nowadays, it's all circle hook, so you don't have the same gut hooking issues, but the etiquette hasn't changed much. Essentially when you are working a bait ball, you are trolling 2-3 lines with no dredges or teasers. Essentially you try to position the inside long rigger and flat line to pull through the bait ball. When you aren't working a visible bait ball, the normal trolling pattern (dredges and teasers) are back out. That being said, when we were trying to get in position to freedive on the bait balls, we caught 2-3 sails off of baits that were actually dangling from the riggers!!!
Also, that was 20 sails caught even though we spent a good bit of time trying to find good bait balls to dive on. If we hadn’t dove on them, we would have easily been in the 30’s, I’m sure. We zig-zagged the ocean and at one point were 40 miles off the can which is a pretty long distance from where they had been catching them.
Skinnee, I was down there a week and half ago; the first 15 sails we caught one day we pitched to w/spinning reels using circle hooks, pretty much stationary in one spot for 45 minutes or so… The rest of the time we trolled. Just curious if ya’lled backed down on any schools and used spinning reels. I was thinking that from teh underwater photos/video…
40 miles off, did ya’ll head north? We were on top of them not far offshore, in sight of land 2 of 3 days. On the first day, within a few miles out of the channel, a group of maybe 10 sporties were all backed in on each other, presumably free casting as they appeared stationary to me… we went past them and found another group of birds…
JIYC, we just followed the bite. Most days, the bite was much closer, but we were trying to get some good video (which requires a decent bait ball). A few boats were 40 miles up the beach reporting tons of birds, bait, etc, so we joined them at some point in they day.
