With fishing fairly quiet inshore, I headed offshore on Memorial Day. Conditions were spectacular – bright and sunny, light breeze, strong tides. Cap’t Dick was at the helm, joined by JoeMama and friends. We hit a few bait spots, and we worked hard to come up with some decent threadfins, hardtails, cigar minnows, pinfish and blue runners. Then we noticed the bait was dying off. Not a good sign. We hit The Sulphur Barge first, looking for amberjack. They were there, just on the small side. We landed a few up to around 20 pounds, then decided to bring the bigger ones to the boat with a chum line.

We chopped up old frozen sardines, while freelining a big live sarding 30 yadrs behind the boat. Strange… no amberjack in the chum line. Suddenly, the rod went off, and Pat was hooked up to something big. Line screamed off the reel, and there was a huge splash a couple hundred feet behind the boat. The fight was on:

The battle went on for about an hour, till a big bull shark in the 400 pound range was boatside. It was a clean release.

Next up was a ledge holding grouper and snapper. The bite was off, though, probably because we were fishing 3 days off the full moon. I nailed a nice mango, and we boated a 28″ gag grouper. We landed plenty of short red grouper, along with the occasional Key West grunt. I lost a big cobia boatside. And we were rocked by a few big gags. Plenty of action, just not a lot of fish in the cooler. Then Joe caught a doormat flounder using a big sand perch:

All in all, it was a great day on the water. Looking forward to the next trip!

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