What a day for Wahoo. This time of year it is hard to find a break in the weather, so when it happened we jumped at the opportunity.
The ocean started off like "Lake Atlantic", but about 35 miles out the seas kicked up to 3-4 feet and made the last 25 miles a little slower. Thankfully, the winds & seas continued to lie throughout the day and made for a good ride in.
We put lines out in a 140' of water and started trolling east. We initially put out a new stretch 30 lure on the center line way back. The lure wasn't out more than 20 minutes until it got crushed. The fish started dumping a 50W like a hot knife through butter. About 30 second later the line went slack. After retrieving the lure we realized that the split rings that attach the hooks were pulled straight and the hooks were ripped off. WOW....that is unreal pressure, we never got to see the fish, but one can only imagine that is was a serious Wahoo. We then got a solid hook up on a rigged Spanish Mackerel fished on a planer. Dad was up on the reel and got a serious work out, this fish was really strong. The fished weighed in at 43#. The bite went dead after that for about 2 hours, then all of the sudden...BAM we have three lines get crushed by Wahoo. In each instance we lost the fish. It was frustrating to say the least, but also gave us hope of the bite turning on. A little later Craig hooked up a nice 40# Wahoo off of a rigged ballyhoo fished deep on a planer. After that, with 2 'hoos in the boat, we decided to try our luck with the bottom fish. We had been hoping for the opportunity to put dad on some nice grouper, but today was not the day. We caught a couple football sized beeliners and a couple pink snapper, but that was it for bottom fish.
All in all a decent day of fishing. Unfortunately, we lost a couple fish but that is just part of it. It gives us that many more reason to get back out there.
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