A day of surprises.
Put in on the inside. Plan was to fish, various spots, moving out from the ramp through Whitewater Bay to ultimately end up at Rivermouth’s looking for bigger snook on the incoming.
On the way out, I caught Jack, sea trout and mangrove on fly.
at some point, my trolling motor ■■■■ the bed. Turned out that my lithium was not charged, which was odd because I checked it the night and it was at 75% but when I got back home, everything seems good now, so lesson learned plug it in the day before regardless. Maybe I read 75 instead of 7.5.
Fishing’s was rather difficult in those areas by yourself, especially at Rivermouth without a trolling motor
Then at some point, my NMEA connect to the engine stopped working turned out just to be the NMEA cable came loose. fixed on the water.
Without a trolling motor and big thunderstorms rolling over the inside, I pushed past the markers offshore, looking for Cobia permit random grouper, snapper etc.
Got to my spot on the outside, but there was already a Boat there with five people a Castnet, chum and live bait. I gave them plenty of space until I saw a dark patch that I moved towards. turned out to be school of permit. Despite my best efforts without a trolling motor, I could not get them to eat a fly. Switched flys 3x. again challenging without a trolling motor trying to match drift to fish direction to wind.
At some point on the run offshore, my engine was losing trim slowly. Fortunately, I have my break-in service scheduled for next week.
Ended up hooking some Jack Cravell on fly. one of them, despite my best efforts got taxed but I got a good hook set on the shark and fought until my hook bent out.
With that spot more or less done and large rain clouds over Whitewater bay, and the shoreline, I push south to enter back through the Ocean side of flamingo.
Ran to the coast to avoid some waves and look for a fishing spots, but saw several boats already on the shoreline, so pushed back out to some markers.
As expected lots of life on one of the markers, but also lots of sharks. When I was about done fishing there a bull shark came to the surface about 8 feet away from my boat with two decent cobia on its back, took a quick look at me and went back under. Well, forget packing up I was about to try and catch these cobia. No luck finding that shark or seeing the cobia again, but I saw lots of bait. I thought that I had a bait rig (Sabiki) and was going to try and catch one bait fish to then catch a shark to pull up the cobia and then catch the cobia. Well, no Sabki rig to be found but I had a small Wiggle jig and a piece of deli meat. I threw that out, thinking I could catch one of these bait fish and surprise caught a bonefish.
(no I’m not proud of my bonefish photo. Didn’t even realize it was a bonefish until it was on the boat, snapped a quick photo and it was released just fine.)
In the hunt for Cobia, I kept throwing an NLBN and hooked up to a shark. On a medium weight inshore spinning rod with a VR 50 reel. Fight was going well until the hook pulled.
Really the story of the day was the fight was against seaweed on every cast, I had seaweed and fighting the shark and the boat became covered in seaweed that traveled up the line.
Fast forward to a Pathfinder that rolled up on the spot earlier and gave me space came back an hour or so later I flagged him down and told them to fish the marker that I was only chasing two things cobia and permit and didn’t think it would interfere with what they were doing. They were just trying to catch the big Goliath at the bottom. I gave them the marker and ran my boat to where I saw some frigatebirds.
Under the frigatebirds, was large packs of Jack Cravell doing damage to small top water bait fish. Picked up a few of those on light tackle and fly and moved to yet another dark patch that ended up being permit. Surprisingly the permit ate an NLBN.
Well, now that I had a bone fish and a permit, it was time to look for tarpon. It was past 5pm at this point I’d run over 80 miles at this point and decided to head back towards the marina. The thought crossed my mind just to try and catch one of the tarpon in the marina to get the slam, but insteadI passed by one of the near islands and tried to find some tarpon in the channel. Only spent 20 minutes and no luck.