MARATHON, Florida Keys — Spring is here, thank God.  It seems that our cold days are in our past.  The water temperature has been warming and soon we will be in full swing with lots of dolphin.  The Gulf Stream has moved in and out this week, this has caused the shallower water to warm as well as the heat from the sun too.  Keep you eyes and ears open because it isn’t going to be long before the dolphin come pouring through.

I have been all over the pace this week.  I fished the deep, the shallow and all the places in between.  In the beginning of the week we went out for tunas at the hump and did very well.  Most of the tunas were perfect size, not too small to eat and not too big where the meat gets really red.  I prefer the 10-20 pounders…they have pinkish meat and I believe it is the best tasting.  We filled the cooler with all the tuna my clients could eat and then we took a short ride to the west to fish for queen snapper.  We caught tilefish, and queen snappers — good size to them as well.  The fish have been averaging 12 pounds, but we have been getting a few close to 20 pounds.

The next charter this past week was a guide trip.  A guide trip is when I jump on my clients boat and I give hands on training of the rigs, bait, and the area.  If anyone is interested in this please give me a call…I would love to help you out!  My client Dave wanted to learn about the reef so we went yellow tailing.  It took a while for the yellowtails to pop up, but once they did we caught a few before they got spooked off buy the numerous kings and mackerel…or maybe it was the current (or lack of).  We tried every trick in the book and they still wouldn’t bite.  So I move to another spot out in 88 feet of water.

We marked a nice school, but I hadn’t been in this spot for quite some time now, so who knew that we would get into some great mangrove action?  Most of them were 3-4 pounds, but none smaller than 2 pounds.  After the bite died off, we switched to a jig, and whipped-jigged kings and mackerel on 8-pound test line.  What a blast that was!  All throughout the day we were catching grouper on the bottom with a small 1’4 oz jig tipped with a small pinfish.  We were targeting muttons, but only caught groupers and mangroves.   We probably caught 20 groupers (gags, reds, and blacks) and half of them were keepers, which we released unharmed to get a little bigger.  I can’t wait till the grouper season opens, it’s killing me to release such quality fish, but the law is the law.

My next charter was another guide trip and we did our tuna thing for while when we finally caught some small ones, which we bridled up on two Tiagra 50 wides with 80-pound test.  My client wanted to troll live tuna around the hump, so we did.  We didn’t get any strikes but the anticipation of what might eat our baits really got our blood flowing.  One of these days we will get a big marlin or maybe a mako.  While we trolled around trying to get the smaller tunas we picked up one dolphin, which was a bonus.  After a few hours with no strikes we went deep dropping and we caught a 60-pound wreckfish, rosefish, and a barrelfish.  Unfortunately we were unable to keep the wreckfish due to its “no take” status.  They are commercially taken but recreational anglers are not allowed to posses this fish.

On Sunday we headed out o look for yellowfin tuna, but we couldn’t find any.  It was a desert out there, no dolphin and no yellowfins.  We did manage to catch a sailfish on a squid spreader bar.  We looked all over for birds but to no avail.  I was using an open array radar to search for the birds, but we only found a few and they were just flying.

Good luck and keep it safe.