Where Has The Time Gone
Provided by Capt. Jeff Shelar with the "Catch 'Em All" out of Marathon, Florida
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Date Posted: October 18, 2008
Boy, have I sucked at writing reports! I had a charter that's fishing with me in February call me to see if everything was OK.
I realize I haven't written a report since Caleb was born on July 16th. So with that in mind, I'll catch up by covering the past few weeks. Last week we had some great yellowtail snapper action on the reef. Lots of big flags coming right up behind the boat. Most days we could get them to eat on 15lb. fluorocarbon, but some days we had to go down all the way to 10lb. We also jumped offshore one day and found a couple of good floaters holding some nice sized gaffer dolphin. This past week I fished a great bunch of guys for six days. The wind was howling pretty good all week, but we made a week of it. We started off the week out in the bay. We literally caught everything from blacktips to goliath groupers. The highlight of the day was the quantity and quality of the spanish mackerel. We put a bunch in the box for smoking, and the average spanish was around 8lbs. The next four days it really blew, and we mainly hit the reef and the channel. The reef was great, but the yellowtail were huge and way back. We ended up with a good box of flags, with the smallest one being 22" at the fork. We had one bruiser that was a little over 27". The days we hit the channel we caught some real nice muttons. They aren't as big as the deep ones, but nice respectable fish around 8-10lbs. The second day in the channel we were heading to a new spot when I spotted something on the surface. I flipped the boat around and one of the guys(Jurgen) hooked up a big pilchard. As I cruised down seas, we spotted a nice cobia on the surface. He flipped the bait right in front of the cobia, and he swallowed it without hesitation. It dove deep, and after about five minutes, it popped back up with two more bigger cobia following it. Two of the other guys then flipped out baits and both were hooked up immediately. As they fought there fish, I netted the first cobia which weighed around 20lbs. The next one to come up did a perfect roll just out of net range and chaffed through the leader. It was a little bigger, somewhere around 25lbs. After about fifteen minutes the third fish finally popped up. It was much larger than any of us thought. After about another five minutes, I finally got a shot at it with the net. I got it deep in the net, and the big cobia did something I have never seen before. It actually started backing up out of the net. I reached out with all I had and luckily one of the guys grabbed my back pocket. I lifted up and in the net it stayed. I lifted it in and the girth on it was incredible! We got a few pics and in the cooler it went. A couple of hours later we weighed it back at the dock. It was a respectable 52lbs. With one more day to go, I thought that day was definitely our best day. Well, the last day proved to be just as good. We headed out and planned on doing some deep dropping. We stopped at a spot to see if we could catch a few big threadfin herring. Unfortunately the barracudas wanted then just as much, and we managed to only get a few to the boat. So we took off and started heading out to the deep blue. As we were heading out, I kept my eye out for anymore cobia. We were soon rewarded when I spotted a school of about 8-10 cobia right on the surface tailing down seas. I threw the boat into neutral as the guys scrambled to grab a rod. They all started flipping out pilchards, and before I knew it all four of them were hooked up. They all did a great job of not crossing lines, and we took our time getting each fish to the boat. We ended up getting all four in the net and in the cooler, and everybody then high fived. I looked at the clock, and it was just a little after 10:00 in the morning. The rest of the day we went deep dropping and caught some nice muttons, and some big amberjacks. Back at the dock we weighed the four cobias. Two were right around 22lbs., and two were within a half pound of 32lbs. Yesterday was a great last day, and a fun week for all. The really great part was we caught all of the cobia, even the 52 pounder, on 15lb. test. Of course I didn't tell them that until after they were in the boat! Well, Until Next Time....Capt. Jeff
